Kenn Nesbitt, former U.S. Children's Poet Laureate, is celebrated for blending humor and heart in his poetry for children. Known for books such as "My Cat Knows Karate" and "Revenge of the Lunch Ladies," he captivates young readers globally.
Some people love puns, while others hate them with a passion. People who don’t like puns often call them “groaners” because they groan when they hear them.
Personally, I love a good pun. My friend, the poet Jack Pretlutsky once told me he thinks a good pun is one that you can be equally proud of and ashamed of at the same time. His favorite of his own puns was from the last line of his pun-filled poem “We’re Fearless Flying Hot Dogs” from his book Something Big Has Been Here.
This poem, Bob’s Job, is a list poem, meaning that it has a list of items, actions, or something else in it. In this case, the poem includes a list of soda pop brands such as Coca Cola and Mountain Dew.
But honestly, I wrote this entire poem just so I could get to the pun at the end. I hope it doesn’t make you groan too hard.
Bob’s Job
My name is Bob. I have a job.
My job is crushing cans,
like Coca Cola, 7Up,
and lots of other brands.
I flatten cans from Mr. Pibb,
and Dr. Pepper too,
Sierra Mist, and RC Cola,
Sprite, and Mountain Dew.
I whack them with a hammer or
I beat them with a bat,
to pound the Pepsi, squash the Squirt,
and press the Fresca flat.
It’s good to have a job to do,
though sometimes it’s distressing.
I try to keep my chin up,
but my job is soda pressing.
This poem has a rather interesting history. After publishing my first book, The Aliens Have Landed at Our School!, my editor asked if I could write an entire collection of funny poems about school. I assured him that I could and set to work creating a new book.
When I was done writing it, he asked what I thought it should be called. My response was that I though it should be called Falling Asleep in Class, as that was one of my favorite poems from the book. He may have been concerned that people would think it was a boring book that would make readers fall asleep, and instead suggested the title When the Teacher Isn’t Looking.
I fought against this title, arguing that would make teachers think I was encouraging students to misbehave in class. I think his response was, “Oh, get over it. It’s funny!”
While my previous (and subsequent) poetry books all were named after one of the poems in the book, there was no poem in this collection called “When the Teacher Isn’t Looking.” However, there was a poem called “When the Teacher’s Back Is Turned.” So that the book title would match one of the poems in the collection, I renamed “When the Teacher’s Back Is Turned” to “When the Teacher Isn’t Looking.”
This is that poem. I hope you enjoy it!
When the Teacher Isn’t Looking
When the teacher’s back is turned,
we never scream and shout.
Never do we drop our books
and try to freak her out.
No one throws a pencil
at the ceiling of the class.
No one tries to hit the fire alarm
and break the glass.
We don’t cough in unison
and loudly clear our throats.
No one’s shooting paper wads
or passing little notes.
She must think we’re so polite.
We never make a peep.
Really, though, it’s just because
we all go right to sleep.
Occasionally, I get an email from someone who needs longer poems or shorter poems. They may be looking for something two or three minutes long to recite in a poetry festival. Or they may want poems that are easy to memorize.
And sometimes I get requests from teachers for poems that provide examples of a given poetic technique. It might be alliteration, metaphor, repetition, or some other device.
With more than 700 poems on this website, it will take a while to assign categories and lengths to all of my poems. So don’t be surprised if your favorite poem of mine isn’t yet in the place it belongs. I have organized about 200 poems so far, and will be working on the rest over the coming weeks.
Nevertheless, I hope you find these new features helpful. I hope you not only enjoy reading my poems, but also sharing them with your friends and family. If you are a teacher, feel free to share them with your students and use them to teach poetry in your classroom.
I often feel that summer is the best of all seasons, especially when you’re in school for the rest of the year. In the summertime, you don’t usually have to go to school. Instead you can swim, play in the park, or even just stay home and play games instead of doing homework.
I have written several poems about how much I like summer, including this one from my book When the Teacher Isn’t Looking.
I can’t wait for summer, when school days are done,
to spend the days playing outside in the sun.
I won’t have to study. No homework, no tests.
Just afternoons spent on adventures and quests.
Instead of mathematics and writing reports,
I’ll go to the park and play summertime sports.
Instead of assignments, report cards, and grades,
I’ll get to play baseball and watch the parades.
I’ll swing on the playground. I’ll swim in the pool
instead of just practicing lessons in school.
The second the school year is finally done
I’ll spend every minute with friends having fun.
I hardly can wait for the end of the year.
I’m counting the days until summer is here.
It’s hard to be patient. It’s hard to be cool.
It’s hard to believe it’s the first day of school.
In this lesson, I’ll show you an easy way to write an “onomatopoeia poem,” or what I like to call an “onomatopoem,” even though that isn’t a real word. And I’ll show you why you want to include onomatopoeia in your poems.
An onomatopoeia (pronounced on-uh-mah-tuh-pee-uh) is a word that sounds like the action it describes. For example, the word “boom” sounds like an explosion, and the word “moo” sounds like the noise a cow makes.
Using onomatopoeia in a poem can engage the reader’s senses with more vivid imagery and heightened sensory impact, without having to use additional words. If your poem contains actions, it’s a good idea to include onomatopoeia in your writing. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you were writing a poem about skiing and you said:
Skiing down the snowy hill
This describes what you are doing, and the reader can certainly visualize it. But what if, instead, you said:
Swooshing down the snowy hill
Do you see how this evokes the sense of sound? If gives the reader not just a visual image of the skier, but also the sound that their skis make on the snow, and perhaps even the side-to-side motion of the skis, all without adding extra words.
Poetry Is Condensed Language
Poetry is often described as “condensed language,” meaning that it tries to convey as much meaning and feeling as possible with few words. If you are writing prose—stories, essays, etc.—you still want to be concise; to avoid using unnecessary words. But it’s also okay to be as descriptive as possible.
In poetry, on the other hand, the more meaning or emotion you can pack into just a few words, the better. With onomatopoeia your words can do double duty, conveying both meaning and sensation. Take a look at this excerpt from my poem “What to Do with a Dinosaur” from my book Revenge of the Lunch Ladies.
This morning a dinosaur tromped into school,
ferocious, atrocious, and dripping with drool.
He had to be practically twenty feet tall,
and banged around looking something to maul.
He stomped and he snorted, he bellowed and roared.
His head hit the ceiling and busted a board.
That beast was undoubtedly ready for lunch.
He snatched up a chair in his teeth with a crunch,
I’ve underlined the onomatopoeia words in these two stanzas to make them easier to spot. As you can see, these words not only describe what the dinosaur is doing, but they evoke the sounds he is making as well. Without the onomatopoeia, it would lose a lot of its impact, as you can see below.
This morning a dinosaur came into school,
ferocious, atrocious, and covered with drool.
He had to be practically twenty feet tall,
and walked around looking something to maul.
In other words, as you write, and as you edit and revise your poems, look for opportunities to replace your verbs with ones that also evoke sounds.
An Easy Onomatopoeia Poem
If you are writing rhyming poetry, sometimes you may even want to rhyme some of your onomatopoeia words. To make this as easy as possible, I have created a list of rhyming onomatopoeia words, such as bash / crash / smash, and growl / howl / yowl.
You could even write an entire poem with almost nothing but onomatopoeia words if you like. Just look at the list of rhyming onomatopoeia words and string a few together, like this:
You can write as many lines as you want like this. Then all you need is an ending. Here are a couple of ideas:
These are sounds I heard at home.
My house sounds just like a poem.
Or how about this one?
This is not some great idea.
It’s just onomatopoeia.
Now it’s your turn. If you can add a few more lines of onomatopoeia words to this, and maybe even come up with a different ending, you’ll have created your very own “onomatopoem.”
Learning More about Onomatopoeia in Poetry
If you want to learn even more about onomatopoeia in poems, here are some useful lessons:
Kenn Nesbitt, former U.S. Children's Poet Laureate, is celebrated for blending humor and heart in his poetry for children. Known for books such as "My Cat Knows Karate" and "Revenge of the Lunch Ladies," he captivates young readers globally.
From my book Revenge of the Lunch Ladies, this is either a story of a science experiment gone very, very wrong, or it is an elaborate excuse for not turning in your homework. Or possibly both.
It is also a long way to go for a groaner of an ending, but I had so much fun writing it that I just couldn’t help myself.
Lastly, this is also a good example of using onomatopoeia—words that sound like the actions they describe—in a poem. Words like “burble,” “slither,” and “gobble” all evoke sounds as well as visual descriptions. I used these intentionally to heighten the sensory impact of the poem and make it more engaging. I hope you enjoy it.
Science Homework
I hope that you believe me
for I wouldn’t tell a lie.
I cannot turn my science homework in
and this is why:
I messed up the assignment
that you gave us yesterday.
It burbled from its test tube
and went slithering away.
It wriggled off the table
and it landed with a splat,
convulsed across my bedroom floor
and terrorized the cat.
It shambled down the staircase
with a horrid glorping noise.
It wobbled to the family room
and gobbled all my toys.
It tumbled to the kitchen
and digested every plate.
That slimy blob enlarged
with every item that it ate.
It writhed around the living room
digesting lamps and chairs,
then snuck up on our napping dog
and caught him unawares.
I came to school upset today.
My head’s in such a fog.
But this is my excuse:
You see, my homework at my dog.
About 150 years ago, an English children’s writer named William Brighty Rands wrote a poem called “Godfrey Gordon Gustavus Gore” about a boy who refused to ever shut the door and never listened to his parents until they built a sailboat and threatened to send him off to Singapore.
About 50 years ago, Shel Silverstein wrote one of his most famous poems, “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out,” about a young girl who wouldn’t take the garbage out and met an untimely fate within that trash. In fact, just as Shel Silverstein’s poem was inspired by these earlier poems, my first poem, “Scrawny Tawny Skinner,” was inspired by “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout.”
I thought it would be a good idea to write another cautionary tale to pay homage to these poems of yesteryear, and this is the result. I hope you enjoy it.
Bradley Bentley Baxter Bloom
Bradley Bentley Baxter Bloome would never, ever clean his room. He simply dropped things on the floor and left them there forevermore. And even if his parents yelled, complaining that his bedroom smelled, and told him, “Bradley Bentley Bloome, go get a bucket and a broom and bring them back and clean your room,” he just refused to pick things up. So every cord, or coat, or cup, or Christmas card or candy cane that hit the floor would just remain.
It only took a little while before he had a massive pile of dirty clothes and greasy plates and dust-encrusted roller skates and tattered toys and grimy games and broken bits of picture frames and rumpled rags and rusted keys and crumpled bags and cracked CDs and stuff he’d never seen before on every inch of bedroom floor.
And even as the clutter grew with one more muddy, cruddy shoe, or old and moldy pear or plum, or sloppy glob of chewing gum, or burst balloon, or flattened hat, or battered book, or baseball bat, or worn and torn up magazine, still Bradley Bloome would never clean.
He didn’t even seem to care as rubbish covered up his chair, his desk, his bookcase, and his bed, and piled up higher than his head, until, at last, there wasn’t room enough to breathe for Bradley Bloome. His parents heard him scream and shout, and tried but couldn’t get him out, because the garbage on the floor had filled the room and blocked the door.
And, in the end, young Bradley died, and everyone who knew him cried. His parents wailed and tore their hair. His teacher wept in deep despair. His gran and grandpa grieved and groaned. His siblings sobbed. His classmates moaned. His friends all whimpered, “Bradley! Bradley! Please come back. We miss you badly!”
But, just like kids who came before, like Godfrey Gordon Gustavus Gore, the boy who never would shut the door, and Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout, who would not take the garbage out, and scrawny little Tawny Skinner, who could not, would not eat her dinner, poor Bradley Bentley Baxter Bloome unfortunately met his doom, within the grease and grime and gloom that blocked the door and sealed his tomb.
So, children, if I may assume you do not want to meet your doom like Bradley Bentley Baxter Bloome, go get a bucket and a broom and bring them back and clean your room.
An onomatopoeia is a word whose sound is similar to the action it refers to, such as “buzz” or “hiss.” Using onomatopoetic words in a poem can help increase the sensory impact of the poem, creating vivid imagery because the words themselves evoke sounds as well as meaning.
If you are writing rhyming poetry you may occasional need to include onomatopoeia rhymes in your poems. Here is a list of a few hundred onomatopoeia rhymes you can use as you write.
Have you ever accidentally fallen asleep in class? I know I did a few times, though not until I was in high school. If you fell asleep in elementary school, that’s just proof that kids are much more advanced these days.
My book When the Teacher Isn’t Looking has about 50 poems about all the funny things that happen at school. This one is about someone who fell asleep in class and woke up startled when the bell rang.
Falling Asleep in Class
I fell asleep in class today, as I was awfully bored. I laid my head upon my desk and closed my eyes and snored.
I woke to find a piece of paper sticking to my face. I'd slobbered on my textbooks, and my hair was a disgrace.
My clothes were badly rumpled, and my eyes were glazed and red. My binder left a three-ring indentation in my head.
I slept through class, and probably I would have slept some more, except my students woke me as they headed out the door.
