I was honoured to be chosen, along with two other poets, to be part of the Catching Words project at the Discover Children's Story Centre in Stratford. This is a literacy project focusing on using poetry to engage 'underperforming' Year 2 children, which is a challenge on two levels: they are 'underperforming', and they are Year 2! I was very grateful to be accepted onto the project, as the other poets are Joseph Coelho, Paul Lyalls and Adisa, each of whom has many, many years of experience. It would have been easy for Discover to turn me away on the basis of my relative lack of it, but what can I say: they couldn't say no!
But this blog post isn't really about the Catching Words project. Hopefully when I embark upon it I will have a lot to say and to reflect on, but what concerns me now is losing words. For the other week I had an experience which, thankfully, is rare, but is no less uncomfortable for that when it happens - I forgot the lines to a poem. And I didn't just momentarily lose them, I had a total blank. Luckily there was an audience of precisely three people, so news of my gaffe didn't exactly spread far and wide, but it was very unpleasant.
Perhaps, however, losing words is not such a bad thing. Obviously if it happens all the time one needs to develop strategies to combat it (such as, well, reading the words from a piece of paper), but the occasional forgetting of a line simply shows that a poet is also a human. This can be important with an audience of children, and on the couple of occasions when it has happened in school I have used it as an occasion to demystify the reality of what it is to be a performer, and to demonstrate that making a mistake is OK. Hopefully after having seen me fumble with words, the children will feel less inhibited when it comes to writing and performing their own. And the same goes for other ostensibly undesirable traits in a performer, such as 'the shakes'.
I'd still rather simply never forget words though. That would be better.
