![[Mrs. Brown
on Exhibit cover]](browncover.jpg)
2002
2002
Links last updated May, 2006
You might be interested, while you are reading the poems in Mrs. Brown
on Exhibit, to learn a little more about how they were written, what
actual exhibits inspired them, and where you could find out more about
the poems' subjects - a list of fascinating books and Internet sites you might
enjoy exploring. The poems are presented below in the same order in which they
are found in the book. Or you can jump to a particular poem by clicking
on the name:
Mrs. Brown on Exhibit
The Mummy's Smile
Dinosaur TV
James at the Candy Museum
Statues
Little Dancer
Sarah Enters a Painting
Live Butterflies
Insectarium
Objects Swallowed and Inhaled
Soap Lady
Skulls
Middle Ages
Raymond in the Clock Museum
Giant Heart
Disasters at the Museum
Steam Train Noise
Grace's Partner
Wait till You See This
This kind of re-thinking of structure and emphasis is something that often
occurs during the editing of a book. Usually a writer finds that some of what
she's written can be reshaped to fit the altered idea. But often new material
must be created as well. To get just a small hint of the process, compare the
opening poem below, which was the version for the original book, with the
first poem in the book as it was published. How many lines can you find that
remained the same, or nearly the same? Much of the poem, as you can see, had
to be completely re-invented:
Museum Days
Up the stairs and through the doors
For mummies and steamboats and dinosaurs,
For feathered headdresses, painted pigs,
Castles, owls, and colonial wigs.
We visit museums on Saturday;
It's better than ice cream or going out to play.
Just Mom and me. Or Dad and me.
Oh, yeah, and sometimes Alex - he's three.
I hold my breath walking down the hall
Past swords or vampire bats on the wall.
Around a corner, I stop to stare
At a stuffed yak with shaggy hair.
And Alex gets bigger and bigger eyes
As he stands in a roomful of butterflies.
Nowhere else could we talk a walk
Past Eskimo Curlew and Great Auk.
We cross the sidewalk and open the door:
Treasures and chills and wonders in store.
You might also compare the speakers of the two poems. Does Ann, the narrator of "Mrs. Brown on Exhibit," remind you at all of Alex's older sister? I hope so because in my mind she's the same person, and the poems Ann speaks and her actions in the published book keep alive that first museum visitor from the original version of the book.
2. The Mummy's Smile
More about the poem:
When I was a little girl, I sometimes spent Sunday afternoons at the
Reading Public Museum,
where I was especially fascinated by a stuffed black bear, a Bella Coola owl
mask, a suit of Japanese armor, a fountain of a barefoot boy spitting water,
and a series of wooden cabinets with glass windows into which (after climbing
two steps and standing on tiptoe) I could peer at tiny dioramas of scenes
such as a Lenape village or a polar bear on the ice.
If you look closely, you'll find that I slipped several of those old friends into the book. (Can you find them?) My special shivery favorite, though, was the mummy, with her eerie thumb-print eyes, and so she has a poem all her own. The details in the poem, from the black horn nails on her toes to the jar holding her intestines, give an exact description of my childhood mummy. (No, my memory isn't that good - I revisited her and took notes.) According to the inscription on her coffin, my mummy's the daughter of Ka-Priest and the lady of the house for the musician of Min. And she's well over 2,000 years old.
I must admit here that the mummy never really whispered to me about her life. In fact, though it was easy to find - displayed in a nearby glass case - a necklace of purple stones she might have worn, I had to do some research on life in ancient Egypt to find out what she might actually have eaten. (Of all the possibilities, I liked pomegranates and barley cakes best.) While the mummy remained silent, however, she did smile at me. I think she smiled. :-)
3. Dinosaur TV
More about the poem:
Of all the museum exhibits I visited, probably this one was the most fun,
viewing myself (in the midst of a class of kids) out in the jungle,
with dinosaurs flying overhead or thundering past us or roaring right in our
ears. The real "television" screen is located at the Academy of
Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, PA and is actually known as the
Time
Machine.
I owe to this exhibit my original acquaintance with Mrs. Brown. I shared the hidden camera room with a class of students who looked to be in about third grade. And when the tyrannosaurus suddenly appeared among them, their teacher took a deep breath and roared ferociously. Everyone screamed! "Mrs. Brown!" one student said indignantly. So when my book changed from a family to a class and I needed a lively, funny teacher, there she was, roaring away in my memory. Thank you, Mrs. Brown, wherever you are.
It wasn't hard to figure out how that Mrs. Brown might behave in the other museums I'd visited. All I had to do was lead her to them in my imagination and watch to see what she would do. I also kept for my book two of her students whom I'd particularly noticed that day among the dinosaurs. Their names were Kevin and Grace. On the book cover above, Kevin's the one throwing his paper airplane in front of Grace's camera just as she's snapping a picture. Poor Grace.
On the Internet:
Take an exciting walk with
dinosaurs.
Make your own
dinosaur book.
Check out ideas for
dinosaur crafts
Learn about
dinosaur fact and fiction.
Take a narrated tour
of a dinosaur exhibit.
You might wonder, perhaps, whether I share James's fondness for candy. Well,
this poem was inspired by a small museum in Lititz, PA, the
Candy
Americana
Museum. And after I wrote the first poem, which describes the museum
itself, I couldn't resist writing a second poem, called "Still
at the Candy Museum:"
Sourballs, taffy, caramel sweets,
Mouthfuls and handfuls and armfuls of treats!
Gummi bears, candy corn, pineapple drops,
Jawbreakers, bonbons, and lollipops.
A whole museum for candy!
Jelly beans, gum drops, molasses kisses,
Bags and boxes and barrels of wishes!
Candy umbrellas, candy potatoes,
Even chocolate calculators.
This museum is a dandy!
Humbugs, buttercrunch, toffee creams
Ounces and pounds and tons of dreams!
Pralines, rock candy, coconut strips,
Almond bark, fruit chews, licorice whips.
Living here would be handy.
This poem, as you can see, is an example of a rhyming list poem, and you can probably tell that writing it was fun. I especially enjoyed playing with the off-rhyme of candy potatoes and calculators. [As for living at the museum, I haven't been invited to do that yet, but I'm still hoping. :-)]
In the process of turning cocoa beans into chocolate, the functions of the
machines mentioned in this poem are:
cocoa bean roaster - loosens the cocoa bean shells and brings out the beans'
flavor
cracker-fanner - removes the shells and breaks the beans into pieces
two-stage grinder - turns the bean pieces into a liquid
three-roll refiner - makes the liquid smooth
melangeur - mixes the liquid with other ingredients
The most interesting tidbit I learned while I was researching this poem, however, was the origin of the word chocolate. The first people to use the cocoa beans from which chocolate candy is made today were the Aztecs, Toltecs, and Mayas, who used them to make an unsweetened foamy drink, which they called "chocoatl" (from their word for drink, "atl" and their word for foam, "choco").
On the Internet:
You can find out everything you want to know about candy at
Candy USA.
Do you love chocolate? Learn about
cocoa farming and chocolate production.
Discover how
bubble gum was invented.
Just for fun, visit the
Giant Gum Bubble webpage.
Or tour the wacky world of the Willy Wonka
candy factory.
Two particular statues I used as models for this poem are Boy with Gulls by Charles Cropper Parks and Seated Woman by Michael Price. The latter statue, of course, is the "star" of the poem. She sits at the edge of a flower garden outside the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art on the campus of Ursinus College in Collegeville, PA. She's a very realistic and contemporary-looking woman, who could indeed be anyone's mom, sitting there in a chair looking at the flowers. Had she not been entirely gray, I might have gone over to say hello to her. :-) Since I saw her on a rainy day, however, what struck me even more than how real she seemed, was her eternal, unchangeable serenity, even when her lap had filled up with rain.
On the Internet:
See Lizzy and Gordon's
animated tour of the sculpture garden at the National Gallery of Art.
Visit statues of Ramona Quimby and her friends at the
Beverly
Cleary Sculpture Garden.
6. Little Dancer by Degas
More about the poem:
Of all the statues I saw, my favorite was
Little
Dancer by Edgar Degas, a painter and sculptor who frequently chose
ballet dancers as a subject for his art.
This statue, a favorite of many people, is very famous. Part of what fascinated me about it was that the dancer's tutu,which is her ballet skirt, is made of real cloth and her hair ribbon is real silk. The statue I saw is a bronze casting of the original, which was made of wax. The original statue had real ballet slippers and real hair.
But the thing I like most of all about this statue is the look on her face. Some people think she looks sad or aloof, but I see her expression as a smile, the funniest little smile, as if she has a wonderful secret. So I started wondering what her secret could be and imagining what she might be thinking. And that's how the poem was born.
On the Internet:
For close-ups of the statue's
details, visit this site.
The truth is that works of art often seem to me like alternate worlds. So when I look at paintings, sometimes I like to think of them as if they were doors into real places and I could actually walk into them. Sarah's poem is one of the two I wrote about "entering" paintings.
The second painting was a foggy scene painted by Camille Pissarro. I always
think fog's a little spooky, so I called the poem "Ghost" and
imagined what would happen to me if I was a part of this eerie painting:
This painting's mostly white dots
like drops of fog.
Smoke fuzzy as cotton wool
drifts out of a tall smokestack
and a hazy boat holds shapes
like two men.
In the distance, the shore
blurs away to nearly nothing.
If I could stand there, I'd be
dots, fog, ghost, gone.
On the Internet:
To see some of
Edouard Vuillard's paintings,
visit the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and type his name into the "Search
Our Collection" box.
To find out all about Camille Pissarro, visit
Pissarro the Artist.
Travel to the WebMuseum to see
Pissarro
paintings.
Explore new ways to see art at the
Metropolitan
Museum.
Or discover
how to restore a masterpiece.
Books to read:
The Eyewitness Handbook of Butterflies and Moths by David J. Carter
Caterpillar, Caterpillar by Vivian French
Butterfly Colors by Helen Frost
Butterfly Eggs by Helen Frost
The Butterfly Book: a Kid's Guide to Attracting, Raising, and Keeping
Butterflies by K.R. Hamilton
Butterflies and Moths by Elaine Pascoe
The Butterfly Book by Donald and Lillian Stokes
The Life Cycle of a Butterfly by Trevor Terry
Born to Be a Butterfly by Karen Wallace
Butterflies Fly by Yvonne Winer
An Invitation to the Butterfly Ball by Jane Yolen
On the Internet:
Visit The Butterfly Website.
View a
live butterfly web cam.
Enjoy seeing beautiful
silkmoths.
9. Insectarium
More about the poem:
This poem began as a bird poem, in which I played with all the wonderful names
of birds. My editor, however, told me that several poems playing with bird
names had already been written - and she sent me copies of two of them. I
wonder, she said, if it would be more original, and more fun, to write a poem
using insect names. Well, fun didn't begin to cover it. My search for insects
and their names led me to the amazing
Philadelphia
Insectarium,
where I spent a very happy afternoon examining some fascinating exhibits.
[I came home with a free sample of barbecued insect larvae; it was only nine
calories, but I haven't eaten it yet. Though I have a certain sense of
adventure, I figure everyone's sense of adventure has to draw the line
somewhere, and that seemed like a good spot to me. :-)]
And then with Sheldon's help (he's the one with the Mona Lisa in the cover
picture above), I wrote my insect poem. (Can you see from this little tale
just how valuable editors - and the things they know - can be to a writer?)
For the purposes of the poem, I used the word bugs instead of insects. But although people informally use that term to refer to the many small creeping, crawling, flying invertebrates of the world, true bugs make up only one segment of the family of insects. The true bugs in this poem are the pond skater and toe-biter. Some of the "bugs" mentioned aren't even insects. The tick, funnel weaver, and star-bellied spider are arachnids; the rock slater is a crustacean; and the milipede is a myriapod. For such tiny creatures, "bugs" are a very large and complex subject.
On the Internet:
Check out
"Katerpillars"
and Mystery Bugs.
Learn about
insects
as food.
Get
close-up
portraits of a variety of fascinating insects.
Find out what's bugging scientists at
Sci4kids.
View
movies of virtual
insects.
Have fun with
insect crafts and
activities.
10. Objects Swallowed and Inhaled
11. Soap Lady
12. Skulls
More about these poems:
The three poems found on this spread were all inspired by exhibits at the
Mutter Museum of the
College of Physicians of Philadelphia. This very unusual museum was
certainly the eeriest and most unforgettable place I visited.
The items described in "Objects Swallowed and Inhaled" are all real objects that were actually removed from inside somebody. They are preserved in the Chevalier Jackson Collection, which consists of more than two thousand items that people accidentally swallowed or sucked into their air passages - things like an automobile vibrator spring, a sewing machine bobbin, a cap from Squibbs dental paste, part of a toy radio. Most of these items were found inside kids (in one case, a baby only one day old), but some of the victims were older too. A fifty-eight-year-old, for instance, had somehow swallowed a padlock. The original purpose of this collection was to provide helpful information to doctors, and the notes that accompany the objects explain exactly where they were located and how they were successfully removed from the human body.
The Soap Lady is also a real (and fascinating) exhibit. She was discovered when workers were moving bodies from an old graveyard and found one body that had been transformed into soap. Various factors, including bacteria from the intestinal tract, had chemically changed her body fat into adipocere, a fatty wax which is similar to lye soap. For a long time, this lady was believed to be a woman named Ellenbogen who had died in 1792 of yellow fever. An X-ray of the Soap Lady in the 1980's, however, turned up some straight pins and four-hole buttons from the nineteenth century. Very recently she has been given a CT scan in hopes that researchers can figure out more about who she might really be.
Also on display at the Mutter are 139 central and eastern European skulls originally collected by the Viennese anatomist, Joseph Hyrtl.
Books to read:
The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull by John Bellairs
The Skull of Truth by Bruce Coville
The Skeletal System by Laura Gilbert
The Skull in the Snow and Other Folktales by Toni McCarty
Bare Bones: All about the Human Skeleton by Elise Richards
Atlas of the Human Skull by H. Wayne Sampson
The Visual Dictionary of the Skeleton by Richard Walker
Incredible Skeleton Secrets by Angela Wilkes
13. Middle Ages
More about the poem:
The inspiration for this poem - a portal from the Abbey Church of Saint-Laurent,
which dates back to about 1125-50 - is on display at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art. It's a
wonderful exhibit because it feels so much like an actual piece of the distant
past. It seemed almost as if I'd walked not into a museum but into the Middle
Ages. And that feeling of the past as a tangible presence is what I tried to
capture in the poem.
On the Internet:
View a
medieval
timeline.
You can journey through the middle ages
here.
Take an
interactive tour of a castle.
Make your own
paper castle.
Send a
castle
postcard.
Tour
Tamworth
Castle.
14. Raymond in the Clock Museum
More about the poem:
This poem was inspired by the
National Watch and
Clock Museum in Columbia, PA. And as soon as I walked into that museum,
I knew right away what kind of poem I would have to write. There were so many
clocks making so many sounds that it was the noisiest
museum I'd ever visited. So I knew I needed to write a sound poem. I also
knew right away whose poem it would be. Raymond, the shouter/pointer in the
white shirt in the picture above, was the person who would most love a noisy
museum.
I must confess here that I went to the clock museum only because it was a different kind of museum than any of the others I'd visited, and I wasn't expecting it to be especially interesting. Boy, was I wrong! I never realized how many different kinds of clocks there are: clocks that show the cycle of the moon, clocks that signal the hour with a trumpet blast, clocks that play music box tunes, water clocks called clepsydras, tower clocks (with dials inside seven feet in diameter and bells that weigh 2400 pounds).
The best clock of all, though, was the Stephen Engle Monumental Clock. On the left, a skeleton strikes a thigh bone against a skull every hour. On the right, Father Time strikes a bell. The figure in the middle changes every quarter hour, moving from baby to youth to adult to old person. Twenty minutes before the hour, Revolutionary soldiers parade to fife music. There's also a grand procession of apostles, and a barrel organ plays at twenty-five and fifty-five minutes past each hour. This clock, which was completed in 1878, took more than twenty years to build. I liked this noisy museum every bit as much as Raymond did!
On the Internet:
Take a
walk through time.
Make your own
star
clock.
Learn more about
time travel.
Discover who invented
daylight saving time.
On the Internet:
Find
factoids
about the cardiovascular system.
Visit the
human body.
Explore the Human Body Adventure's
BioSimulator.
Learn all about
the heart.
View
animations and graphics of the
cardiovascular system.
Solve a circulatory system
word search
puzzle.
Have a tough question?
Ask a scientist
As for the tornado, just think about something as flimsy as a plastic straw being pushed through something as hard as a telephone pole, and you have a good idea of the power of a tornado. The tales of what tornadoes can do are absolutely amazing. A tornado can carry a jar of pickles twenty-five miles and set it down unbroken. Or strip all the feathers off a flock of chickens as it passes over a farmyard. But what I saw was that straw stuck in that telephone pole, and I thought I should let it speak for itself.
This kind of poetry is called concrete poetry because the shape of the poem makes a kind of picture of whatever the poem's about. Concrete poems are lots of fun to write. You can write a poem about lightning that makes a jagged streak across the page. Or a poem about rain where the words fall down the page like raindrops. You might want to try a concrete poem of your own.
On the Internet:
Check out
kids' drawings and reports
about tornadoes.
Find out about
storm chasers.
For
tornado myths and oddities
visit the Tornado Project.
View a
tornado photo
album.
Experience the
power of tornadoes.
On the Internet:
Learn
all
about earthquakes.
Get all shaken up at
Earthquakes for Kids.
Read
earthquake legends.
Explore
life along the faultline.
Discover
how earthquakes
work.
Make
your own earthquake.
17. Steam Train Noise
More about the poem:
The steam train at the
Strasburg Railroad was one of
the most entertaining field trips the Brown gang and I took for this
particular book because we could take a ride on the "exhibit". The
most outstanding feature of the steam train, however, was all the noise it
made, and so, like the clock museum poem, this one became a sound poem.
Perhaps you would enjoy writing a sound poem of your own. If so, click here to learn more about sound poems.
On the Internet:
Take a
virtual tour
of the world's largest model railroad.
Discover
pictures and sounds
from the era of the steam engine.
Like the opening poem, this poem originally had a family flavor. Again can
you compare the two poems and see how much of the first poem could be retained
and how much the poem had to be changed to fit its new format:
Alex Sneezed
Alex makes me so mad.
When I was looking at the Owl Mask,
and the spirit of the owl
was flying toward me -
I could feel it! -
Alex burped.
When we sat in the joss house,
listening to a fountain splash,
leaning back to look up
at birds painted on the walls -
and it was so peaceful -
Alex fell off the bench.
When I held out my hand to a butterfly
that fluttered so close
I didn't move,
I didn't even breathe -
and it was just ready to land -
Alex sneezed.
When I stood at the diorama
of a polar bear
fighting six dogs on the ice -
and it felt so real
I could almost hear the growls -
Alex had to go to the bathroom.
Mom says one day Alex
will be big enough,
and I'll like to take him
to the museum then. I can show him
the dinosaur exhibit -
he loves dinosaurs!
I know Mom's right. I'll walk
with Alex up to the big t-rex
that leans its head down close to you.
I'll see Alex catch his breath,
feel him hold my hand real tight,
- and then I'll sneeze.
Does anyone out there have a little brother like Alex? :)
On the Internet:
See
traditional Nuxalk art.
Find out more about the
Bella Coola (Nuxalk) people.
Make your own
owl mask.
View
polar bear pictures.
Visit the
Weaverville Joss House.
Check out the
Little League Museum and
the
National Baseball Hall of Fame.
If you're interested in writing some museum poems of your own, pay a visit to the Mrs. Brown on Exhibit writing guide.
As for me, my favorite museum became such a favorite, that I went there nearly every week for several years. If you'd like to pay them a cyber visit, click here. And if you'd like to find out more about the Lenni Lenape, click here.
Links last updated May, 2006. If you find any broken links among the many, many links on this page, please let me know. I greatly appreciate your help in keeping this page up to date.
To view the Teacher's Guide to writing museum-related poems, click here.
To read the rules for the Kids Can Write poetry contest, click here.
To return to the main screen, click here.