Wordplay tickles this poet, wouldn't you know it

When he was a kid, Douglas Florian hated poetry. Teachers made him memorize such mossy old monuments as "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Hiawatha." <br><br>When he went to college he took a poetry

Wednesday, April 12th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

When he was a kid, Douglas Florian hated poetry. Teachers made him memorize such mossy old monuments as "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Hiawatha."

When he went to college he took a poetry class, hoping to read the Beat poets - Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and that crowd. Instead, he spent the semester reading Milton's "Paradise Lost."

"I got a D in poetry," Mr. Florian says.

So, naturally, Douglas Florian grew up to become a poet.

Not just any kind of poet, but one who writes poetry that kids - and parents who read to kids - actually like.

The proof is the prizes - inclusion on the Association for Library Service to Children's list of Notable Children's Books and a Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award. And in the poems themselves, little explosions of wit and humor that play with language like a very bright and mischievous child.

"In a poem, you can use bad grammar, you can make up words," he says. "It's called poetic license, and I renew mine every six months. It's right next to the Motor Vehicle Bureau. You just go in and they ask you to make a few rhymes.

"In my prime, I could rhyme on a dime."
Mr. Florian also illustrates his poems, and his paintings - gouache on brown-bag paper - are as droll as his verse. It's hard to say whether he's a poet who paints or a painter who writes.

Mr. Florian visited bookstores Monday and Tuesday to kick off Young People's Poetry Week, part of April's National Poetry Month celebrations. The fifth in his series of books on animals, mammalabilia, is just out.

Bugs, birds, beasts and art were part of his childhood.

"When I was a kid - I grew up in New York, in Manhattan and Queens - my parents took me to the American Museum of Natural History and to the Bronx Zoo. My father also painted.

So I grew up surrounded by linseed oil. In fact, I used to watch him paint in the woods. My job was to swat the mosquitoes."

His parents were progressive and indulgent. Mother took him to the library once a week and at night Father read to him, mostly Jack London stories and tales of arctic adventure.

The notion that he, too, could create something hit him when he was 5 or 6, he recalls. "I went to the home of a friend of mine. He had illustrated the walls of his room with pencil drawings. I thought I would try that at home.

"My mom was very tolerant. I think she eventually whitewashed them."

As time went by, others were not so tolerant.
He had started writing poems after coming upon a copy of Oh, That's Ridiculous, a book of humorous verse edited by William Cole.

"It seemed like a lot of fun to do. That summer, 1994, I actually wrote 300 poems. Most ended up in the garbage. They just came rolling out of my brain in a virtual stream."

When he took his first book of poems around to publishing houses, editors informed him that "poetry doesn't sell."

And when he did find a sympathetic publisher, Green Willow books, they already had one poet. "Having two poets was too much."

The publishers had been wrong about one thing, however. Mr. Florian's poetry does sell. Laugh-eteria, Monster Motel, Bing Bang Boing and his four collections of animal poems - beast feast, in the swim, on the wing and the best-selling insectlopedia have won him a growing circle of fans.

His frequent visits to schools have convinced him that "there's definitely more openness now to poetry.

"Kids are encouraged to write more poetry and read more poetry. The whole country has had a poetry explosion. In part it's due to those Bill Moyers PBS specials. And people are going to all these poetry clubs."

Even his kids have started rhyming this year, he says. All except the 7-month-old. The others are 6, 7, 10 and 11.

He looks upon his classroom visits as a kind of laboratory where he can find out what kids like and dislike and, not incidentally, pick up some of his best lines.

"You can never tell what a second-grader will say.

He asked one, "What do you call it when a frog is hiding in the grass?"

"Camofrog," came the reply.

"That's the seed of a poem, there." (And in fact his next book of verse will be about frogs, lizards and snakes.)

Many of his poems get their start with an ending. For "The Gorilla," he had hit on the line, "don't get in his face." But he had read that gorillas are really very gentle creatures.

And so:
A gentle giant
Blessed with grace...
It's stilla gorilla -
Don't get in its face.

"Sometimes I try for a different twist. It's fun to invent new words. A bear might "slum-bear" come "Septem-bear." But, he says, it must not "hi-bear-nate."

"Poems shouldn't be pedantic," he says. "But they have to be correct. I found out that scientists say technically bears don't hibernate. So I changed the word.

Sometimes, language also has to give way to other considerations.

"Some rhymes I've had to give up. I had one poem in which I rhymed 'Jupiter'

and 'stupider.' I don't think that word is allowed in school anymore."

When he's reading his poem "The Caterpillar" in the classroom, he says, he's sensitive to the situation. "If there's a kid with a weight problem in the class, I might change the word 'fatter-pillar' "

But he has little patience for the occasional pedant who complains about his use of twisted grammar and made-up words.

"I like the playful aspect. When I'm writing, I don't know where it's going to go. It's open-ended. The whole trick in poetry is to be natural and unforced.

"Some people like to keep the English language static, like Prince Charles. But I'm sorry, Chuck. English is a living language."
His paintings also violate the "rules." They may look crude at first, but closer examination reveals the delicacy and wit of Japanese rice-paper painting.

"It took me 30 years to paint that naively."
He likes to achieve a tension between looseness and exactness in his work. While he was painting the illustrations for
mammalabilia, he says, he was also looking at folk art.

"With insectlopedia, I wanted collage with a fragile feeling. Here, with mammals, I wanted something more substantial."

To get that feeling of substance, he painted with opaque watercolors on brown paper bags - like you get in supermarkets; I guess I'm helping the recycling movement. Then, "to shake things up a bit," he cut them and pasted them together.

"I'm an abstract painter. I spend half my year going into my studio doing abstract paintings. I have to watch myself so it doesn't become too abstract. With my illustrations, I wanted to evoke something. I think every square inch of a painting should be equally important."

But not to get too serious. After all, he says, the point of all this care and labor is to have fun.

"Once I was writing a funny poem in the bedroom, and I was laughing.

"My wife called up to me, 'What are you laughing about?'

"I said, 'I'm working.' "