When I was a kid I had a record album of kids’ poetry. There was one hilarious little poem that went something like this:
I know that you know, and he knows you
And she knows the he knows, I know that is true
But does he know that she knows that I know too (etc)
Something like that, anyway. My recollection, which may be faulty, is that the record album was predominantly light yellow and had a whimsical drawing of a face on it. The publisher was “Spoken Arts” and the poem was by John Ciardi, who was reading his own poem.
But I’ll be damned if I can find such a poem anywhere, although clearly it is entirely consistent with the Ciardi oeuvre. HELP!
I also grew up listening to John Ciardi children’s poetry. When I was in college I had the chance to meet him and he thought it was pretty funny that I knew him primarily from his children’s work - because he was a serious poet. I still know all the words to ‘I said to a bug in the sink.’