Poetry inspires art.  That’s probably the backbone of almost every picture book I’ve talked about so far this month.  But today, the opposite is true: art inspires poetry.

“World Make Way” is another picture book poetry collection by Lee Bennett Hopkins.  He worked with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, choosing some of their pieces and then commissioned a variety of poets to write about each one.  Choosing the art was half the battle, he said (as there were SO many pieces to choose from) when he talked about it last fall at the Highlights retreat.

And boy did those poets deliver as well.  There are a variety of poets writing about a lot of different things.  It’s fun to see what a picture inspires.  It might be even more fun in the future to see what one picture inspires from a multitude of poets.

I had several favorites in this collection (of course), but the one I picked is probably my top favorite.  It is a poem by Ann Whitford Paul (the queen of teaching about picture book writing herself) and the painting it is inspired by.