Digging Revisited

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

- Seamus Heaney

You see, I tried this and it doesn’t work.

The effort it takes to make an adequate hole

just isn’t worth it. It did diddly squat.

I got mud under my fingernails

and into the clicking mechanism of the biro.

The soil clogged it up.

What’s more, the plants remain unplanted.

I spent all day digging with this stupid pen 

and now the garden’s just a mess. 

Let’s do things properly. Let’s get to work. 

Give me that spade. 

I’ll write a poem with it.

Joshua Seigal 

Eleven Seconds

She’s still the person

she once was, but not fully – 

older now, more frail,

she gets flustered easily 

and finds forms overwhelming.

She’s not used to living by herself.

Moving cautiously, slowly, 

she takes forever

to get to the phone.

I call her just before I go away,

to say goodbye and make sure she’s OK. 

Hanging up, I notice the call

lasted eleven seconds

and I think that this may just have been

the best eleven seconds

in both of our weeks.

I marvel at how the mere sound

of my voice could have meant

so much to her. 

And I wonder at how I swore I could hear

the smile on her face

at the end of the line.

Joshua Seigal

an angry teacher takes me to task

When I shared my previous blog post on Facebook, it was met with general positivity. However, an angry teacher dissented. She accused me of modelling 'bad' and 'incorrect' writing. This is what she said:

this isn't the standard that kids should have modelled. How will they learn to do things correctly if they're taught to do them wrong?

At the time, this was my response:

When I teach poetry, I demonstrate that the first step is to get ideas down on the page, without fear, with a pure love of creativity. Editing comes later. Kids shouldn't worry about getting everything right first time. That's what I'm demonstrating. I am giving away a writing idea for free. Use it, don't use it, it's up to you.

I bear no animosity toward the teacher. I have nothing but respect for the amazing job teachers do. But I couldn't resist writing a poem in response. The poem is below. I'm still not too sure about the ending. (NB the poem is NOT an attack on teachers. I love teachers. I am married to a teacher. The poem is just a bit of fun.)

I Tried to Write a Poem 

I tried to write a poem

but my teacher told me NO – 

I hadn’t put a comma

where a comma has to go;

my mind was far too hasty

to begin my writing, so

I hadn’t written up the date

or drawn a line below.

I tried to write a poem

but my teacher told me STOP – 

I hadn’t done my title

or affixed my name on top; 

my letters were all wonky 

and my spelling was a flop; 

the way I held my writing pen

was surely for the chop. 

I tried to write a poem

but my teacher told me HALT – 

she bellowed her displeasure

in a thunderous assault;

a crucial thing was missing

and its absence was my fault;

in light of my excitement

I neglected to put ‘WALT’.

I tried to write a poem 

but my teacher told me CEASE – 

the way I formed my syntax

would offend the Grammar Police;

my mind was full of wonder

which I had to now release;

the levels of my eagerness

I needed to decrease.

I tried to write a poem

but my teacher shot it dead;

I’ll gather my ideas up

and put them all to bed; 

I’ll take my inspiration

and I’ll pour it out my head,

then hand in my humanity

and be a tree instead.

Joshua Seigal 

ADVENTURE POEMS! Poetry Workshop Idea for Younger Children (EYFS/KS1

Step 1 - gather list of EXCITING VERBS

Step 2: using REPETITION, turn each line into an adventure!

VARIATION: each line could be a separate adventure (as above), or each line could be part of the same adventure, as with the variation below:

HAVE FUN!!

My favourite poem that I've written

It's a question I am often asked, when I visit schools and elsewhere: what is my favourite poem that I've written? When it comes to my writing for children, I often reply that it is my piece 'I Don't Like Poetry', the poem for which I am probably best known. However, the poem that is closest to my heart may be one that was not written for children. The poem is called 'Here We All Are', and you can read it HERE. When I wrote this poem I wanted to aim high in terms of publication, so I sent it out to all the fancy journals, all of whom rejected it. All, that is, except one: I was delighted when the poem found a home in Poetry Wales, where it was published in November 2023. The poem touches deeply on my Welsh ancestry, so this was probably my first choice home for it in any case. 

Why is this poem so special to me? It's really hard to say. The poem tackles aspects of family history that lie deeply buried within my family's and my community's collective psyche. In Seamus Heaney's famous poem 'Digging', he states that, since he is not suited to digging with a spade, he will take his pen "and dig with it." 'Here We All Are' is probably the poem in which it feels like I am digging deepest.

When I was a teenager, I had Larkin's 'This Be the Verse' taped up on my bedroom wall. Being the cynical, sardonic little smartarse that I was, this poem spoke to me deeply - "They F you up, your mum and dad" - damn straight they do! The subsequent verses, about man "hand[ing] on mysery to man", which then "deepen[s] like a coastal shelf", gave my teenage mind the permission to impute my supposed failings (of which I perceived there to be many) onto something else, namely the generations before me.

As I've grown up, I feel I have lost the misanthropy that led me to put Larkin's poem on my wall. But I have maintained an interest in psychoanalysis, in particular the concept of intergeneration trauma, as discussed by Peter Fonagy and others. 'Here We All Are' does not have Larkin's curmudgeonliness, but it retains a kind of psychoanalytically-informed unease at the state of the human condition. 

Sorry. I know that last sentence sounds very pretentious. To put it bluntly: I think 'Here We All Are', perhaps more than any other poem I've written, says what it wants to say. I try to say the truth; I try to say it succinctly, withour pretention, and in a way that does it justice. I'm not saying I think it is an amazing poem; I'm just saying that I think it does most of what I want it to do, which is to tell the truth about family history, and the reality of what it means to have an ancestry in the first place. 

the edition of Poetry Wales in which my poem is published :) 

Isn't It Weird

to think that everyone

was once a baby?

I was once a baby, and so were you.

Your parents – they were once babies too.

Even your Great Aunt Beryl,

with her hairy chin and shrivelled skin like a prune,

she was once a baby.

Maybe not a very attractive baby,

but a baby nonetheless.

Your teachers?

Your teachers were once babies.

Every single one of them.

And that teaching assistant

who seems about a million years old,

she was once – you guessed it – a baby.

She may even have been

a very cute, squishy baby.

And also your…

you know what, it doesn’t matter!

whoever you think of –

they were once a baby.

A teeny, tiny little baby.

Isn’t that weird?

Joshua Seigal