Waiting to Waltz: A Childhood

I decided to read Cynthia Rylant’s Waiting to Waltz: A Childhood right after reading her autobiography because I thought there might be some overlap between the two and maybe having read her autobiography would help me in reading this book. As you can tell because I have left the four poetry books until the very end, poetry is my least favorite genre. I’m not even sure why, but ever since I was a kid I decided that I can’t make any sense out of poetry and I’ve banished it to be the genre I read the least, even less than science fiction and fantasy.

My choice to read this book after Rylant’s autobiography was a good one. I recognized many of the characters and topics from the childhood that I had just read about. I had already read about her life growing up in Beaver, West Virginia before I read her poem about what it was like to move there from a more rural area. In her autobiography, Rylant mentions that she has issues accepting God and religion and mentions an incident where she was moved to go to the front of a church service and be saved; she describes how she later felt tricked into doing this. This memory was translated into one of her poems (“Saved”).

I’m really not sure how I feel about this book. I like that Rylant uses poetry to describe the ordinary events of her childhood, like going to church, seeing the movie “To Kill a Mockingbird”, her landlord, and buying a chili dog from the Kul-Kup. This is a lot like her short stories in The Van Gogh Café because both are written about everyday happenings. The tone of the book seems very dark, and the illustrations add to that. They seem to be done in pencil and are all dark and foreboding. Many of her poems deal with death or loss, which seem to be big issues in her life and other books.

One of my favorite poems was “Spelling Bee”. Like Rylant, I was in a spelling bee in the second grade where I had to compete against the third-graders. I was doing really well until I was given the word “between”, which was a third-grade word. I didn’t think I needed to study the third-grade words since I was only a second-grader, but I was wrong and needed to know how to spell all of the words. When I got this word, I remember panicking and spelling it “beetwen”; I knew I was wrong immediately and felt like I had let my teacher down. I could really relate to how Rylant felt in her spelling bee when she spells “woke” wrong. I also liked her last poem “The World”; I thought it was a really good way for her to end the book. It contributes closure as well as a hint of hope for the future because her dreams fill up Beaver Creek and will flow along with it out into the world.

Perhaps this book (and maybe all poetry?) is better for me as a read-aloud. I read the book silently, but then read certain poems aloud to my boyfriend when I was telling him about this book. When I was reading aloud and pausing at the appropriate parts, I appreciated the poetry more. I am going to try this technique when I read the other poetry books and see if I come to appreciate this genre more.