NEW YORK — Beginning work a few years ago on her latest book, an anthology of poems for young people, Caroline Kennedy found herself looking through one of her mother’s scrapbooks. She burst into laughter, she says, as she came across a poem that her brother John, as a youngster, had picked out and copied as a gift to their poetry-loving mom.

“Willie with a thirst for gore, Nailed his sister to the door,” went the poem, by an unknown author. “Mother said with humor quaint, ‘Careful, Willie, don’t scratch the paint!”’

The poem “brought back memories of our relationship,” Kennedy told a bookstore audience. “I laughed so hard.”

But for Kennedy, now 55 and a mother of three grown children, there’s a deeper meaning to that irreverent ditty. Poetry was a central part of her home life growing up. She and John regularly copied out and illustrated poems for their mother, Jackie, upon birthdays and Mother’s Days.

Now, with her 10th book, Kennedy wants to share with young readers the love for the written word that she feels her poetry-filled childhood helped instill in her (even though her own son, she quips, hates reading and only likes two poems.) Hence the title: “Poems to Learn By Heart.”

“It was a combination of remembering my own childhood and thinking about gifts I’d been given,” she said in an interview recently at her husband’s downtown Manhattan design firm, explaining the genesis of the latest book.

It’s also an effort to promote literacy, a cause Kennedy has supported in a number of ways. “Fourteen percent of American adults can’t read,” Kennedy says. “It’s a slow-motion disaster.”

She believes poetry can help. “Kids need a way in,” she says, “and reading needs to be fun. Poetry can give them that — with the current emphasis on poetry slams, and these other open mic events. That’s actually why I think poetry has a chance.”

Kennedy’s current book — a collection of poems from various authors, with introductions by her to each section, and vivid illustrations by John J Muth — is her fourth to focus on poetry. Her earlier books, especially “The Best Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,” have been huge sellers.