Shel Silverstein 1933-1999
Shel Silverstein was not your average children’s
book author. He began his professional career drawing
cartoons for Playboy. He was known to dress from head to
toe in black leather. Most importantly he was the first poet
to have an impact on me and many other kids. He wrote and
illustrated playful verse that rivaled that of Doctor Suess
(Theodore S. Geisel). But unlike Suess, who tended to hide
his subversive messages under fantastical creatures and
nonsense words, Silverstein had a sort of brutal honesty.
He was the only poet who could write, tastefully and
comically, about eating a baby. This kind of material caused
his poetry collection Where The Sidewalk Ends to be
banned by a Texas school district. But it gained him the
adoration of thousands of children who felt that they were
getting away with something by reading his poems.
Silverstein also had a sentimental side. His 1964 classic The
Giving Tree remains one of the most beautiful and tragic
stories written in the English language.
I would be lying if I did not admit that I stopped
reading Shel Silverstein’s work several years ago because I
thought it was “too childish.” I essentially deserted him the
day I flipped through one of my mother’s Ginsberg books
and found out that there were poems with the word ‘fuck’
in them. In retrospect however, perhaps I would not have
the respect and interest that I do for more “mature” poetry
that I do if it were not for Shel Silverstein. Maybe I would
not be so entranced by spoken word recordings by people
such as William S. Buttoughs and Henry Rollins if at a
young age my mother had not bought me a recording of
Silverstein “singing, reciting, and shouting” poems from
Where The Sidewalk Ends. And it was Shel Silverstein who
first made me realize that, as he says in his poem Listen To
The Mustn’ts: “Anything can happen, child, ANYTHING
at all.”
return to Antisocialzine Anti-Corporation homepage
