Billy Collins festival continues

First Reader

I can see them standing politely on the wide pages

that I was still learning to turn,

Jane in a blue jumper, Dick with his crayon-brown hair,

playing with a ball or exploring the cosmos

of the backyard, unaware they are the first characters,

the boy and girl who begin fiction.

But I would read about the perfect boy and his sister

even before I would read about Adam and Eve, garden

and gate,

and before I heard the name Gutenberg, the type

of their simple talk was moving into my focusing eyes.

It was always Saturday and he and she

were always pointing at something and shouting "Look!"

pointing at the dog, the bicycle, or at their father

as he pushed a hand mower over the lawn,

waving at aproned Mother framed in the kitchen doorway,

pointing toward the sky, pointing at each other.

They wanted us to look but we had looked already

and seen the shaded lawn, the wagon, the postman.

We had seen the dog, walked, watered, and fed the animal,

and  now it was time to discover the infinite, clicking

permutations of the alphabet's small and capital letters.

Alphabetical ourselves in the rows of classroom desks,

we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.

                                                   Billy Collins

Dick and Jane first appeared in 1930 and continued in a subsequent series of books through the final version in 1965. These readers were used in classrooms in the United States and in other English-speaking countries for nearly four decades, reaching the height of their popularity in the 1950s, when 80 percent of first-grade students in the United States used them. 

Zerna Sharp developed the main characters of "Dick" and "Jane," the older brother and sister in a fictional family that included "Mother," "Father," and a younger sister named "Sally," their pets, "Spot" (originally a cat in the 1930s, but a dog in later editions), and "Puff," their cat; and a toy teddy bear named "Tim." Sharp named the characters, selected and edited the storylines from ideas that others submitted, and supervised production of the books. William Gray and others wrote the Dick and Jane stories; illustrator Eleanor B. Campbell did most of the early illustrations.