A hippo sandwich is easy to make.
 All you do is simply take
 One slice of bread,
 One slice of cake,
 Some mayonnaise
 One onion ring,
 One hippopotamus
 One piece of string,
 A dash of pepper --
 That ought to do it.
 And now comes the problem...
 Biting into it!

Uniting the hippo and food motifs…

(from ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’)

The word that comes to mind when speaking of Silverstein is ‘inimitable’ - his best poems have a flavour about them that is hard to define, but unmistakably there.

Silverstein was, sadly, not a poet I was aware of as a child - I’d read the occasional poem in anthologies (and, what’s more, remembered them, so that when I finally did discover his books I could point to the odd piece and say ‘hey - I’ve seen that before’), but his name was lost among a bunch of other, more-deservingly-forgotten poets. I’m glad to say that his poems lose very little when read from an adult perspective, but I can’t help but wonder how much more magical they’d have been when I was part of the target audience.

Today’s piece is pretty self-explanatory - but note the oh-so-innocent way ‘one hippopotamus’ is slipped into the ingredient list. And where but in a child’s universe would one slice of bread and one of cake make up a sandwich recipe? :)

Biography

http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Club/6166/ss/ssbio.html

Links

An excellent Silverstein page is

http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/silverstein.htmtin

And here’s a great site devoted to all things hippopotamous:
http://members.aol.com/HippoPage/table.htm

See particularly the poems section:
http://members.aol.com/HippoPage/hipppoem.htm
(complete with unexpected entries by L. Sprague de Camp and Jane Yolen, and illustrations for both yesterday’s poem and today’s)

And speaking of recipes, there’s the ever-popular stuffed camel:
http://home.tiac.net/~cri/1997/camel.html

— Martin