Writing Poems About School

Along with fellow poets Sarah Perry and Belinda Zhawi, I am currently working one day a week in an inner-city London secondary school. The placement is part of my course at Goldsmiths, where I am focusing on 'Spoken Word Education'. The aim is to place poets in schools, with the purpose, essentially, of giving pupils a voice and helping them see that their viewpoints, experiences and imaginations are of value.

Yesterday I was at the school, and read over some poems that the students had been writing. The particular poems I read expressed their views on school life, and I was shocked and saddened by the low estimation in which the overwhelming majority of the pupils held school. I'm not sure whether they would have had similar things to say no matter which school they'd been at, or whether their vitriol was exacerbated by the idiosyncracies of their particular school (I suspect a bit of both), but the general disdain and anger was intense. A recurring metaphor was that of school as a prison, and teachers as hypocritical, sinister prison wardens. School was at best seen as a place of utter tedium and pointlessness, and at worst as a place of outright torture and enslavement. I did not come away feeling happy or uplifted, especially with respect to the pupils' views of their teachers. My experience inside staffrooms tells me that teachers are almost all admirable people who are passionate about doing right by their pupils. I've even written a poem to that effect.

But we are giving pupils a voice, and this is that they have said, and I think we need therefore to accept it as valid. I don't think this means that the views must go totally unchallenged - presenting opposing viewpoints and flipsides of arguments seems to me to be a good thing - but this should not occur in the context of attempting to show that pupils' views are mistaken or wrong. This is how they feel and we need to work with it.

Given this, reflecting on the pupils' poems has provided me with a couple of insights. Firstly, their dissatisfaction with school is evidence of the potential of the Spoken Word Education programme to make a real difference in their lives. Not only has it given them an outlet to voice grievances that might well otherwise have stayed bottled up, it has also shown them they can use those grievances creatively, to produce art.

Secondly, the notion of grievances about school that are voiced within the context of school reveals what seems to me to be something of a tension. Is there the risk that, through the mere act of running a lesson, the educator becomes part of the 'system', and therefore part of the very grievance itself? This is at least prima facie problematic, and I think it is incumbent upon the educator to find a way of running sessions within the school, and very much as part of the school, but in a way that is nonetheless different to what the students are used to, so that they don't just become yet another thing about school to hate. If this is done skillfully and delicately then school might become less of an oppressive place, and the grievance will hopefully start to dissipate.

Reflections On Book Week 2014

On March 6th it was World Book Day. This meant that I had a very busy week, visiting lots of schools who decided to turn the entire week into 'book week' or 'literacy week' or similar. On Tuesday I visited Barnes Farm Infant School in Chelmsford, on Wednesday I went to Ashwell Primary in Hertfordshire, on Thursday I went to St Mary's Primary (also in Hertfordshire), and on Friday I visited Preston Park in Brent, London. I had a wonderful time in each of these schools, and I made sure to do different workshops each day, as I wanted to keep things fresh and interesting for myself. Highlights of the week included:

• Being persistently called Ooshus Magooshus by the pupils at Barnes Farm
• Being presented with a wonderful book of poetry written by pupils at Ashwell, using this poem of mine to inspire them. (I unwittingly replicated the activity during one of my workshops, and the pupils were great sports in going along with it!)
• Writing poems about embarrassing moments with Year 5 at Preston Park, and showing them this hilarious viral video. One of the children laughed so hard he fell off his chair.
• Selling almost 100 books during the course of the week. 
• Writing 'poetry is' poems with St Mary's pupils, and receiving this lovely thank you email from their teacher, which almost brought a tear to my eye:

Well what can I say?

Poetry is a fruitful day at school

Poetry is a happy class

Poetry is "Thankyou " from colleagues

Poetry is a sunny day

Poetry is in the smile of a child

Poetry is in us all!

Poetry is when we all realise it!

Poetry is a thankyou

Poetry is a special thanks

To you

A truly lovely, albeit exhausting week. I've written these things down in part as a reminder to myself, for when I get disillusioned or depressed, that the work I do emphatically does have value. 

'But You Don't Write Poems Like That' (+ a VERY silly poem)

Tomorrow I am due to give a presentation, as part of my MA, on the topic of my 'poetics', i.e. the overarching philosophy or ideology that informs my work both as a poet and as an educator. I have been instructed to come up with a metaphor to describe my poetics, and my metaphor is that of a tightrope: my experiences on the page, on the stage and in the classroom have revealed to me a variety of apparent dichotomies that, on closer inspection, can in fact be bridged. Like walking a tightrope, bridging them requires a degree of care and dexterity that I hope I grow to possess over the coming years. Here, then, are what I perceive to be the 'tensions', as they relate to my own work:

My work as a poet

• 'fun' poetry vs 'deep' poetry
• didacticism vs artistry
• writing for children vs writing for adults

My work as an educator

• teaching vs entertaining
• drawing on imagination vs drawing on real life experiences
• allowing freedom vs drawing boundaries

These tensions are painted with extremely broad brushstrokes, and relate to my work as a whole, rather than to any one particular poem or lesson; it may not be possible to bridge each of them within the course of a single poem or lesson. What I'd like to do now is briefly to look at the first tension, between 'fun' poetry and 'deep' poetry.

I perceive this as a tension in part because of my experiences with a variety of children's poetry. I notice that some poets write stuff about snot and farts, which makes kids laugh but which doesn't carry any deeper message - the equivalent of Viz magazine perhaps - and some poets write earnest little numbers about 'deep' stuff like sunsets and love. My point is not that either of these is wrong per se, but that each is diminished in the absence of the other: only silly stuff and the potential for words to touch the core of our psyche is not explored; only deep stuff and kids, like adults, will think "whatever, lets go watch television." The optimum, then, would be to achieve a balance.

The reality of this tension in my own work was brought home to me last night, when I was babysitting my young cousins. When I had put them to bed I decided, in a rare moment of self-discipline, to sit at their kitchen table and write a poem. I decided that this would be a 'deep' poem, a poem about a boy and his father watching a bonfire, the bonfire serving as a metaphor for their love for each other (insert either "ahhh!" or "pass the sickbag" depending on which side of the 'tension' your proclivities lie). My 10-year-old cousin Jack couldn't sleep, and came downstairs. He asked what I was doing, and I told him that I was writing a poem. He looked over my shoulder and said "but Josh, you don't write poems like that. You write catchy rhyming stuff." (Notice that he is referring to form as well as content: catchy rhyming stuff.)

I told him that variety is good, and that I write lots of different stuff. However, the challenge, for me, is not simply to write lots of different types of poems, but to imbue the whole body of work with a sense of being recognisably 'mine'; it is to bridge the tension, and all the other tensions mentioned above, in a way  that does not leave me seeming like a variety of different people. In other words, it is to encompass many different possibilities within the parameters of a single unified poetics, rather than dabble in lots of different, erm, poeticses [?].

To return to my cousin. What he meant was that he liked the catchy, rhyming stuff and he wanted me to write more of it. So after having explained to him that variety is good, and that if you have just catchy rhyming stuff you leave your horizons fairly limited, I decided that now would be a good time to GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT! So I invited him to sit and help me write a catchy rhyming poem, about a subject of his choice. In the spirit of nothing other than fun, then, here is the poem we came up with together (WARNING: it is ridiculously silly. The fact that he couldn't sleep for laughing determined that this was a good thing):

My Sister

If you come over to my house

And look inside my loo,

There will be a big surprise - 

A special treat for you. 

You may not see it straight away

In fact you may well miss her,

But if you peer really close

I think you'll see my sister. 

You may think this is rather strange

You may think it's absurd,

But this, I promise, is the truth:

My sister is a turd. 

Special Poem For Barnes Farm Infant School, Chelmsford

My website states that, if a school books me to run a day on a specific theme, then I will write that school a special poem on that theme. Next week I am visiting Barnes Farm Infant School in Chelmsford, Essex, whose Literacy Week focuses on the theme of 'jungle'. Behold, then, this poem, written especially for them.

My Neighbour Owns a Lion

My neighbour owns a lion

It lives out in his shed

I sometimes hear it roaring

When I’m lying in my bed

 

It roams among the flowers

It paces up and down

My neighbour’s lion surely is

The only one in town

 

Sometimes he plays fetch with it

But not with sticks, with logs

He doesn’t feed it from a tin

He feeds it cats and dogs

 

The lion’s always hungry

It prowls in search of prey

In fact my neighbour’s lion

Caught a burglar yesterday

 

My neighbour owns a lion

It’s ready to attack

But my ball is in his garden –

Will you help me get it back?

'Miss Creedle Teaches Creative Writing' - Some Thoughts

It has been a while since a poem has made me think as much as did Gareth Owen's 'Miss Creedle Teaches Creative Writing' when I happened upon it in an anthology this morning (you can read it here). A cursory bit of research subsequently informed me that the poem is actually quite well-known, and has been mentioned in various academic texts as a satire on the 'Creative Writing Movement' of the 60s and 70s. Owen's poem is seen by many as articulating some of the flaws in this approach to developing pupils' writing.

I got something slightly different from the poem. I am largely neutral as to the benefits or otherwise of the general type of approach adopted by Miss Creedle, in which she basically encourages her pupils to close their eyes and use their imaginations in order to stimulate writing. I know for a fact that this approach can work very well, especially with Gifted and Talented writers with whom I have, like Miss Creedle, used Beethoven as a writing stimulus. I have also, on occasion, adopted a similar approach with mixed ability classes, where I have asked pupils to describe emotions using a 'show don't tell' technique involving each of their five senses. I have seen it work, but I very much appreciate that some children find this sort of exercise extraordinarily difficult and frustrating, and on one or two unhappy occasions children have even been reduced to tears because the ideas wouldn't flow. I see at least two possible ways of rectifying this. The first would be to emphasise very clearly that there are no right or wrong answers or approaches, and not to be in any way prescriptive about the kinds of things the children should write. The second would be to go in the opposite direction and provide some very clear modelling and scaffolding, so the children are left in no doubt what is expected of them. Perhaps these two approaches can each benefit different pupils, and perhaps they can be used in conjunction so that all pupils are given clear parameters within which to exercise their imaginations.

The humour in Owen's poem is derived from the fact that Miss Creedle flounders in the middle of these two possibilities, adopting neither one approach nor t'other. There is an uneasy juxtaposition: on the one hand Miss Creedle is encouraging the free roaming of the imagination (so free, indeed, that it is not even stated what they are supposed to be imagining in the first place), but in the next breath she undermines this with sporadic and haphazard interjections as to the kinds of things she wants her pupils to write. It is notable that the very first verb attributed to Miss Creedle is "cries"; she doesn't 'suggest' or even 'announce' that the children will be using their imaginations, she 'cries'. Miss Creedle is anxious, and is not fully signed up to the ethos she is purporting to put into practice. She is not ready to let go and entrust her pupils with their own imaginations, but paradoxically she wants to do this too badly to be able to provide a clear template for them. In her floundering Miss Creedle has transferred her own anxiety onto her pupils, leaving them longing for a time of certainty when the expectations of teachers were at least explicit, when "hours passed like a dream/ Filled with ordering and measuring and tests".

Speaking from my own experience, I can completely relate to Miss Creedle's anxiety. I hope my approach is less ham-fisted and obviously hypocritical as hers, but I am always wanting to plant ideas in pupils' heads, to inform them of what I think would be good adjectives or interesting things to say, and frequently these ideas come to me in a spontaneous, Creedlesque manner. In part this may stem from a lack of trust in my pupils and a fear that they will end up with nothing to show for their time with me, and in part it stems from a simple desire to impart my knowledge and vocabulary onto them. But I am conscious that these are all (hopefully very much surmountable) weaknesses of mine, not of the exercises I am asking my pupils to do. The real object of Owen's satire, it seems to me, is not a pedagogy in which teachers stimulate pupils to write from their imaginations, but those practitioners who, whether for personal or systemic reasons, are not equipped to give order to this and to follow it where it leads.

Gamification

A couple of years ago my brother founded a tech startup. It is through listening to conversations between him and his co-founder that I first heard the term 'gamification'. I thought at first that this might refer to the process a limb goes through on the way to becoming gangrenous or something (i.e. gammy) - what can I say, I love playing with words. Anyway, 'gamification' does not refer to this at all, but rather to the application of game-based principles in ostensibly non-gaming contexts. Such an approach can often be beneficial in the context of running writing workshops.

It is far from a revelation that younger children especially can be fired up by the notion that the task they are about to undertake will have a 'winner', and that there will be prizes. Thus, framing a writing task as a competition can be useful in sparking off an initial impetus to write, and in sustaining that motivation. What is also true is that such an approach can work to inspire reluctant older students to get writing. Earlier this week I ran a poetry workshop with a group of Year 9 students whom I had met on two previous occasions. On each of these occasions several of them were unwilling to get involved, expressing the view that poetry and writing were 'not for them', and a few wrote nothing at all. Our third meeting differed from the previous two in that the content was designed with a view to encouraging imaginative flights of fancy rather than developing emotional literacy - something which the class were not going for in our previous sessions - and also in that it involved gamification: the exercises were framed as competitions. Here is what I did:

• Yucky food lists, with an edible prize for the student who comes up with the most original, imaginative item of vile 'food'. 
• Food metaphors. Students had to describe an aspect of themselves or someone they know (appearance, personality, specific incident, etc) using a food-based metaphor. Cliches were banned, and an edible prize was given for the most imaginative, original metaphor (or simile).
• 5-line poems. Students had to take either an item yucky food from their list, or a food metaphor, and use it in a 5-line poem. This time, the prize was given for sharing their poem with the class, something that had previously been extremely unwilling to do. 

I think that the gamification, and the fact I didn't encourage them to delve deeply into potentially painful or difficult aspects of their personal lives. helped to foster a willingness both to write and to share with the group. However, I am conscious of various limitations with these strategies.

Firstly, whilst in this instance the emphasis on slight silliness helped galvanise the group, I would, in the long term, want to use this as a springboard to explore deeper issues. I do not believe that poetry has to be deep or emotional - anyone who has heard me shout the nonsense word Yab with a roomful of 5-year-olds will attest to this! - but I would hope, once trust and willingness has been built up in the ways adumbrated above, to open up a space whereby this becomes possible. In other words, I would not want to play silly games, give out sweets, and simply leave it at that!

Secondly, gamification is probably not necessary, or even appropriate, with some groups. I took the decision to gamify the Year 9 session on the back of two sessions that, in my eyes, weren't quite meeting the students' needs. With a less reluctant group I probably wouldn't have taken that course. For me, the gamification of writing is the exception rather than the rule: I appreciate its benefit in certain instances with certain groups, but I would probably avoid it otherwise: it can feel contrived to a group who are perfectly willing to write anyway, and I'm not really a big fan of competition within the sphere of writing anyway - with younger children especially, focusing on winning, and who gets the sticker and whether it was deserved, can detract from the real focus of producing really good work. (Possible issue: but how can one establish in the first place whether a group are willing to write?)

My purpose here has been to highly some of the benefits and limitations of gamification. First three people to comment get a Malteser. 

Visit To Martock Primary School, Somerset

The week before last I drove from London to Somerset, to spend the day at Martock Primary School. News of the flooding made me feel like I was venturing forth on some kind of mission, but I needn't have worried - to my mum's relief the journey there was not especially eventful.

What was eventful, however, was the day I spent at the school. I ran workshops with four KS2 classes, covering different themes and techniques in each of the sessions. I was especially delighted that Class 8 (AKA Year 5/6) spent their literacy lesson, which took place directly after my workshop, compiling a lovely pamphlet of their poems, which they gave me to take away. I have that pamphlet in my hand now, and I'd like to share some of their wonderful poems on my blog.

Class 8 wrote poems on the theme of Fear. After a warm-up exercise in which I asked them to describe fear using their five senses. I shared a poem, 'Not A Care In The World', detailing some of the things that I myself used to worry about when I was in school. Pupils then wrote their own poems, using ideas generated in the warm up and through having listened to my poem. I was especially impressed with the range of the work generated, from humorous poems about shopping to serious, dark poems about death. The poems I'm about to share demonstrate this range, which is partly why I have chosen them (another reason being that I think they each contain some really interesting ideas and responses to the topic). I suppose it is one of my primary aims when I conduct workshops to allow room for a wide variety of responses to different stimuli; I want to provide a space in which ideas can be taken in a variety of directions. I do not believe there are right of wrong ways to write a poem, or right or wrong things to write about.

Anyway. Let's crack on with the poems!

Fear Is (by Melissa)

Fear is darkness creeping up to me like a tiger on its prey,
You hear people's echoes and screams calling for help as fear
sinks into the mind,
Fear is a phantom, a demon of darkness, a shadow, faceless
but forever watching you,
The smell of rotting flesh blocks the nose,
I see frost and ice from dark coldness
I'm walking on a beach of black sand, every grain is a fear,
The taste of sour fierce fear spreads on the tip of my tongue,
Fear is the end of pain, it ends all pain with death.

My Fear Of Shopping (By Callum)

Bags rustling
Pets squealing
Mums moaning
Dads grumbling
Babies screaming
Break baking
Getting lost
Clothes aisles
Slimy Meat
Cheese like feet
Stinky fish
Smelly dog food
Manky cat food
Little boys groan
Mums still moan
Tesco's prices
Asda's spices
Morrison's slices
Sainsbury's rices
Mouldy jam
Revolting spam
Spicy chickens
Chicken tikka
Uncle Ben's
Bad meal deals
Horse meat burgers
DVDs from the 1940s
Cheap games
Broken consoles
Bad bargains
Terrible fizzy pop
Never shop!

Fear (By Charlotte)

The smell of Fear isn't very nice, it smells of burnt
bacon in the pan.

The taste of Fear tastes like Salt and Vinegar Crisps without the salt.

The sight of Fear looks like a black cloud creeping past you.

The tough of Fear is like a dry desert where it hasn't
rained for years.

The sound of Fear is the sound of a woman screaming
loudly at the sight of a dark shadow creeping towards
her.

All the things to do with Fear are in your head.

Fear (By Josie)

Fear tastes like a plain chip
Death is hopeless it is evil it has broken lots of
hearts and falling tears falling down my face thinking
about her every day and how
she loved me and my dogs

An honourable mention must also go to Jordan, who used what was DEFINITELY the most intriguing metaphor: "Fear tastes like bitter otter bear." Please Lord, don't ever let me taste a bitter otter bear!!!