For over twenty years Jack Prelutsky has been a forerunner in what he refers to as the children's poetry "renaissance." Prelutsky has published over thirty titles. He's compiled anthologies like The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (Random, $15.95) or Read Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young (available with cassette from Knopf, $19.95) where he draws on many current writers who he believes are "some of the best children's poets who ever lived". He's devoted himself to subjects like Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep (Greenwillow, $13.95) or It's Christmas! (available with cassette from Scholastic $5.95). And he's filled his books with irreverent humor as in his best-selling, kid-adored New Kid on the Block (Morrow, $15.00 ) and Something Big Has Been Here (Greenwillow, $15.95).

Now, while Jurassic Park sweeps the country, poet Jack Prelutsky turns his talents to different lizards in his latest book, The Dragons Are Singing Tonight (Greenwillow, $15.00) . While the movie uses technology to work its magic, Prelutsky uses a similarly fantastic technology of words to amaze and delight readers from six to twelve. Dragons are special to Prelutsky. Through years of going into Chinese restaurants and reading their placemats, "I noticed years ago that I was born in a year of the dragon, so I sort of took the dragon to heart."

He grew up in the Bronx with an asthmatic mother who couldn't allow pets. "I was an imaginative kid and I would dream of having pets like unicorns and tiny elephants. One of my dreams was that I had my own dragon... a small one, of course, that I could manage and train." Some of the poems in The Dragons Are Singing Tonight show his boyhood dream. There's "the dragon in the bathtub that only I can see" in I Have A Secret Dragon and "the small dragons bought in the mall" in I Have a Dozen Dragons.

This newest book was a hard one for Prelutsky to write. "New Kid on the Block and Something Big Has Been Here each have a hundred poems and The Dragons are Singing Tonight doesn't have that many poems, only seventeen, but I wanted to build a feeling for dragons and I had to find completely different things to say about them." In his poems, Prelutsky gets under the reptilian skins of all kinds of different dragons. He views completely through dragon eyes whether he's feeling power in I AM BOOM! or sad enslavement in I Am My Master's Dragon.

Prelutsky is one of the most trusted names in children's poetry. During the school year he probably gets a hundred letters a week from kids "and I answer them all. Kids know that I'm their friend because I'm on their side and I write about the things they care about--outer space, monsters, dragons, sports, food fights, sibling rivalry, and weird friends.  I never condescend.  I try to tell things in unique, interesting ways, and I write about the things that kids really do deal with." In Nasty Little Dragonsong he writes about a ferocious half inch dragon who "nobody pays attention to because he's very small. There isn't a child on earth who hasn't felt that way."

Prelutsky is not afraid to use words that will challenge and inspire his readers. Each poem adds its own voice to the collection of songs. "My background is music so I always have music in my head as I'm writing. As soon as I write my poems, I sit down with a guitar and improvise music.

Prelutsky believes even harried working parents can take time for "a daily poetry break" to share with their children" the music of language." "Poems can show us the beauty of our language and how things can be expressed. That's especially important now in our age of computers, video games and quick-fix entertainment. Besides rhyming and poetry are fun!"

Prelutsky writes poems that can be talked about. He wrote Once They All Believed in Dragons, the last poem in the book, in ten minutes, using dragons as a metaphor for the unknown. "I feel there's something missing from the world because now we're so sophisticated and have an answer for everything, but there are still things out there that we know nothing about."

When kids think of Prelutsky, they think of his humor. It comes through many of his poems in The Dragons Are Singing Tonight and in our interview. When I asked which dragon he was, he said, "I'd most like to be Boom, the thunder dragon. But if I had to pick one that's me, it's probably the dragon in I Wish I Had a Dragon. I wish that I was 6' 4", could press 250 pounds and be gorgeous, but truth is I'm just a guy and I like to take baths."

©Susie Wilde 1998