Generally speaking, the younger your audience, the more concrete your poetry must be. Young children have such a limited range of experience that they cannot make connections between the sun and a golden disk because they have no point of reference for "a golden disk." When dealing with young toddlers, they have difficulty grasping comparisons at all. To a toddler, dogs are so much like cats, that if you compare them, the child may have difficulty understanding that they are really different things at all.

BABYBUG is probably the magazine geared toward the youngest of all children. Poetry in BABYBUG may contain play on sounds, but they won't much (if any) simile. The poems for this magazine are often 10 words or so. They will focus on very common experience -- seeing a dog while on an outing with mom, watching water run in a tub, discovering that both balls and trucks roll. The poetry reinforces common experience, helping children discover their world. When the poem goes outside common experience, such as poem about a bear cub snuggling with his mother , they help young children stretch his boundaries slightly -- but not too far since we're still dealing with baby friendly ideas like snuggling with mom, snow is cold, night is for sleeping.

Rhyme and rhythm are important to very young children. Poetry for this group usually has simple meter (and may mimic nursery rhyme meters) and exact rhymes. For BABYBUG, even the stories are likely to rhyme and almost certainly fall into patterns of rhythm. Repetition is also a component of most BABYBUG content. Short sentences and similar sentence constructions are also noticeable. One story about friends at a park used simple action verbs on each page to show common park fun: they swing…they climb…they ride. A variant might come at the end when the story sums up all that togetherness by announcing that friends are good.

LADYBUG targets slightly older children who can understand ways that one thing is like another. I sold LADYBUG a poem that compared dandelions to buttons. In the sample magazines I have on hand, I see pussy willows compared to kittens, a bird on a swaying branch compared to a cowboy at a rodeo, and dandelions compared to lions. Now poetry can be funny since children are sophisticated enough to find the comparing a flower to a lion funny. But not all LADYBUG poetry contains comparisons. Some of them are story-poems like you find in BABYBUG. There is a story poem of boy making friends with a spider; a girl imagining what life would be like with a pet kangaroo; and a child drawing things with yellow. Much of the poetry is active or challenges the child to do something.

TURTLE also targets the preschool child. Unfortunately, TURTLE hasn't been buying a lot of content lately (though they are still open to rebus stories and nonfiction) but they are an example of preschool poetry. TURTLE is especially fond of humor in their poetry and often uses it to soften what are basically lessons. In the sample issues in front of me, I see a funny poem about manners, a funny counting poem comparing being bundled up in winter clothes to being a chubby polar bear cub. TURTLE seems to like their poetry to teach something -- good eating, sleeping, manners, counting.

So by examining successful poetry (meaning published poetry) we can see poetry for preschoolers and younger have common traits:

* exact rhymes and simple meters,
* repetition,
* humor
* action
* connection to common experience
* learning.

Good Luck and remember, keep it simple.