"This Is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness" by Joyce Sidman, Illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski (LS 5663)

Sidman, Joyce. 2007. This Is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness. Illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children.

ISBN: 978-0-544-10507-2 paperback

Cover image from
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
www.hmhbooks.com

When I first picked up Joyce Sidman's This Is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness, I was expecting something entirely on the somber side.  Then I opened the book to find William Carlos Williams' poem "This Is Just to Say" that offers an apology to someone who left a bowl of delicious plums in the refrigerator, because he ate them.  Williams tries to sound contrite, but the utter lusciousness of the plums adds a bit of "sorry, not sorry" to the poem.  The very next poem is written to imitate Williams as a young man named Thomas, apologizes to Mrs. Garcia in the front office for stealing the jelly doughnuts.  In a cheeky tone, Thomas says,

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so gloppy 

Too bad
the powdered sugar
spilled all over my shirt
and gave me
away (Sidman 2007, 8).

And thus sets the tone for the rest of the book.  The first half contains eighteen poems, written by a sixth grade class and their teacher, followed by seventeen more poems that contain a response of forgiveness to the writers of the apologies.  The book is set up as the product of the fictitious sixth grade class of Mrs. Merz at the Florence Scribner School, edited by one of the students, Anthony K., who begins the book with a brief note, saying how it began as an assignment to write "Sorry" poems in the same vein of Williams' "This Is Just to Say."  Anthony then wryly notes that he had the fantastic idea to get the recipients of the apologies to write a response, and the class put them together in a book, illustrated by one of their classmates, with help from the art teacher.  The book is so well put together, that several reviewers on Goodreads were convinced that Mrs. Merz and her class were real.  The poems run the gamut from the cheeky and amusing, like Thomas' poem to Mrs. Garcia, to poignant to the expected solemn poems you'd expect to see in a book of apology poems.  (Warning to the more marshmallowy of you out there: keep a tissue or two handy.  There are a few that tug at the heart strings.)  Sometimes, a response poem is written by a proxy, as in the case of Bao Vang, who wrote a poem of apology to the statue of Florence Scribner, but received a response from DaRon, who wrote in the voice of Florence Scribner.  These poems are probably the most poignant, because they generally commiserate with the person writing the apology.  Two apology poems -- "It Was Quiet" and "Spelling Bomb" -- share a thematic tone in that the authors feel as if they let someone down.  In the case of "It Was Quiet," Tenzin apologizes to his beloved dog, Einstein, for having him put to sleep.  The response from Mr. Johnson, the school custodian, tries to offer Tenzin comfort by explaining he recently had to do the same thing with his own dog, and Tenzin was with Einstein, "loving him, and he was loving you back. / That's how he went. / And that's how a dog should go" (Sidman 2007, 38).

Sidman writes the poems in a mostly free-verse format, but there are two poems that were written in a specific format.  One, a response by Mrs. Merz is written in a haiku, and the other, by Anthony in a apology to his mother for not winning the spelling bee, was written in a form called a pantoum (Sidman 2007, 22).  A pantoum repeats lines two and four of a stanza as lines one and three in the very next stanza (Sidman 2007, 22).  The effect is especially powerful, as Anthony's mea culpa resonates throughout the entire poem, as he acknowledges how he must have horribly disappointed his mother, and how she's taught him "how important it is to win" (Sidman 2007, 22).

Sidman uses a lot of figurative and descriptive language in her poems.  In the poem, "I Got Carried Away," Sidman calls the bounce of the ball, "thumping like a heartbeat,"  which reflects the excitement of playing a spirited game of dodge ball (Sidman 2007, 10).  She tends to use a lot of metaphors, which reflects the age of the ersatz authors of the poem, who are trying to put what they feel in terms they can understand.  The language is richly descriptive, comparing an uncomfortable silence to "a hundred crushing elephants;" the hole left in a pan of freshly-baked brownies "gap[ing]  / like an accusing eye;" the anger in the principal's eyes "like hot sparks;" or how the class lizard Slow-Hand was "stiff as an old glove" when he died (Sidman 2007, 12; 14; 24; 26).  Sidman (2007) also utilizes a well-placed adjectives, so the reader can visualize the freshly-baked brownies, with "gooey hunks of chocolate / wink[ing] at me as I gobbled them" (14).  Mrs. Merz's mother had a glass deer with "slim pink legs" and an "arching neck" nestled in "rough cotton snow" (Sidman 2007, 17).  The reader is able to visualize the small glass deer, bounding through a Christmas scene.  A mother who straightens her daughter's desk calls it "an island of neatness / in an ocean of mess" (Sidman 2007, 32).  Anybody who's ever had a messy room will immediately recognize how fully Sidman manages to describe what a tidied desk will look like in the middle of all that messiness.  In "Sorry Back," Ricky's hamster (or Ricky writing as his hamster) writes how Ricky's mother's hand "was a huge scary claw," which places the reader in the position of the hamster, giving them some insight into just how frightening a person's hand can seem to a hamster (Sidman 2007, 37).  In the poem "Little Brother," written by DaRon's older brother Lamar the descriptive language enumerates all of the qualities DaRon has that Lamar appreciates, such as Daron's "sticky shoes... [that] stay on the ground" (Sidman 2007, 39).  In a response to Raleesha, Carmen and Mrs. Merz write a lovely poem that celebrates Raleesha for who she is, and not what she could mold herself into in order to attract attention.  They praise her "frown that breaks rocks" and "laugh that starts tidal waves" (Sidman 2007, 41).  Another poem with lovely uses of descriptive language is "Ode to Slow-Hand," written by the class to the anonymous classmate who accidentally killed Slow-Hand.  The class remembers "his toes whispered on our hands," "his skin, rough green cloth," "his belly, soft as an old balloon," and "his tongue: lightning's flicker" (Sidman 2007, 45).  It's a loving remembrance of a fellow being, punctuated repeatedly with the phrase "los perdonamos," as the class' forgiveness washes over the anonymous person in the manner envisioned by Portia in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice: "The quality of mercy is not strain'd, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from the heaven" (Sidman 2007, 45; IV.1.i.184-185).  It's a fitting end to the book, this paean to forgiveness.

Sidman often uses the structure of a poem to communicate the thought process or feeling behind a poem.  In "I'm Telling You Now" by José's dad, the long, rambling, unbroken thought reflects how José's feels uncomfortable about the idea of writing the poem, and even possibly how emotionally naked Dad feels, but ending by assuring José that the broken windows José felt compelled to apologize for are ancient history and he shouldn't worry about them.  "I Got Carried Away" and "Dodge Ball Crazy" feature structures where the words moving across the page mimic the motion of a ball streaking across a gym.  "What Was I Thinking," "Some Reasons Why," "Fashion Sense," and "The River of Forgiveness" emulate the narrator gathering their thoughts.  Sometimes, the spaces, like in "To the Girl Who Rubs My Nose," give the narrator a chance highlight something significant.  In "Next Time," Jewel is terrified that her behavior has driven her father away.  The lines "I'm sorry, Daddy" and  "Next time I'll be / perfect" are separated by a space so Jewel's apology can sink into the reader, and the plaintive tone of her promise to be perfect rings as the final note of the apology (Sidman 2007, 25).  The poems are also printed in different fonts, which also contributes to the feeling as if different people composed and typed each poem.

The poems are eminently relatable.  Students know how it feels to say something in an effort to bring levity to the classroom, and inadvertently hurt someone else's feelings.  They've had to have beloved pets put to sleep.  They've broken windows on the house or a parent's prized knick-knack.  They've felt intimidated into ratting out friends to principals.  They've nicked someone else's yummy jelly doughnuts or brownies, and sure, they feel remorse, but not too much, because the baked goods' deliciousness outweighed the remorse.  We are the weird younger sibling or the gruff, but loving older sibling.  We get carried away playing dodge ball or any other sport or playground game.  It is this level of relatability that gives the poems an aura of sentimentality, in that a reader can place themselves in that situation.  They are not of a sentimental vibe that makes a your teeth hurt from the sugary sweetness of the sentiment.

The book has a table of contents that is split into the two parts of apologies and responses.  Each poem lists the "author" in the table of contents.  On the actual poem, after the title the "author" includes who the intended recipient of the poem was.  The actual poems contain a heading with recipient and title and the author at the end.  The pages are also numbered, which doesn't seem like a big deal, but when you're dealing with more than ten poems, page numbers are valuable when you want to quickly find a specific poem.  Sidman's website has a section for This Is Just to Say that has a reader's guide and play adaptation, along with a video of Sidman reading one of the poems.  It also gives more details into the origins of the book.  There's also a writer's guide with advice to beginning poets from the "students" of Mrs. Merz's class.

This Is Just to Say was a Lee Bennett Hopkins honor book in 2007 and the Claudia Lewis Award in 2008.

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Spotlight on...

"Balance" 

To my dad 

Dad, I'm sorry for smashing
the garage window when I was a kid.
Felipe and I were messing around
and saw the cracked pane.
One had a crack,
so they should all have a crack, right?
That's what Felipe said.
We hefted some rocks. 

Then one pane had a jagged hole.
But they all had to match, right?
Felipe said we should balance them out.
I remember the weight of the gritty ricks,
the shiver of tinkling glass,
the wild joy blooming in my chest,
the fear, the running away.
For a while, it seemed like
the bravest thing I had ever done. 

Now I realize Felipe was stupid
to make up a reason to smash things.
And I was even more stupid,
to follow him. 

by José (Sidman 2007, 16)

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In the days leading up to Yom Kippur, Jews are encouraged to seek out their friends and family and ask for forgiveness for any wrongs that they have done to them, either knowingly or unknowingly. It's a pretty humbling thing to do.  "Balance" is one of the many poems in Sidman's This Is Just to Say that would make an excellent introduction into the concept of asking for forgiveness for Jewish adolescents in the process of completing their bar/bat mitzvah and becoming responsible for themselves as Jews in the world.

Students in the class can discuss what it means to ask someone for forgiveness and what it means to forgive other people.  While there is basically a ritualized speech, so to speak, for asking forgiveness during the High Holy Days, it might be more meaningful for the students to make their apologies personal and write a poem to someone they would like to offer an apology.  It can be a friend (Jewish or not) or family member.  Like the students in Mrs. Merz's class, the bar/bat mitzvah students can choose to illustrate their apology poems.  The students are strongly encouraged to share the poems with their person.
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Works Cited

Sidman, Joyce. 2007. This Is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness. Illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children.

Shakespeare, William. 1974. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.