Poetic Licence

Poetry can be divisive. It is clever, yet often makes us feel stupid. It is unpredictable and frustratingly seems to lack a planned direction. Poems can finish Owl and the Pussycatbefore they’ve hardly started. As a teacher, I find it impossible to mark written poetry. And yet, with all this in mind, I love poetry. The language play never fails to fascinate me within the simplest verse, and I revel in the pleasure in knowing that rules can be broken, (destroyed even) by children exploring the form of poetry through experimenting with writing their own.

There are have been many arguments of late for why there should be a place for poetry in the primary curriculum. Poetry has had a bad press. In the summer, as news broke of the content of the draft curriculum, there were outcries when it was gleaned that children should be learning poems off by heart – what purpose would this serve? How would this be useful for a 21st century? But as well as for performing, there was a requirement stated for children to ‘recognise simple recurring literary language in stories and poetry’ and that they should be ‘discussing and expressing views about a wide range of poetry (including contemporary and classic)’ and this is where poetry can play its part in providing breadth and balance to a child’s literary quota.

Whilst stories enable children to empathise with feelings, thoughts, analyse characters motives and predict, poetry on the other hand, strives beyond vertical thinking, towards the skills of interrogation and inference and into the realms of possibilities. It is a force for imagination, a route for escapism and a way of creating an atmosphere where deep reflection can take place. Although through wordplay there is horseplay, and poems also lend themselves to humorous anecdotes, laugh out loud moments and the opportunity to sneak a silly (or rude!) word or phrase in to surprise, and create comedic imagery. Spike Milligan was the master of this; through simple verse he managed to make just a few words conjour up the most ridiculous of situations. My favourite -

‘Can a parrot
Eat a carrot
Standing on his head?
If I did that my mum would send me
Straight upstairs to bed’

Poems have had a role of late of setting the tone of the nation. For moments of national reflection, we have had a Poet Laureate to mark occasion and this is reminiscent of World War One poetry, which many of us either studied at school ourselves, or use when we are trying to teach the significance of Rememberance Sunday, when we are searching for imagery such us Wilfred Owen’s haunting power of ‘Dulce et Decorum est’.

So, love it or loathe it, it is a language form with literary qualities. A form with which we can utilise to teach. And better described below by our Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, in her poem, ‘The Words of Poems’ .

The words of poems are nails
which tack the wind to a page,
so that the gone hour
when your kite pulled you over the field
blows in your hair.
They’re hand-mirrors, a poem’s words,
holding the wept tears on your face,
like a purse holds small change, or the breath
that said things.
They’re fishing-nets,
scooping sprats and tiddlers out of a stream
or the gleaming trout that startled the air
when you threw it back. The words of poems
are stars, dot-to-dots of the Great Bear,
the Milky Way your telescope caught; or breves
filled with the light of the full moon you saw
from your bedroom window; or little flames
like the tongues of Hallowe’en candles.
The words of poems are spells, dropping
like pennies into a wishing-well, remember
the far splash? They’re sparklers,
scrawling their silver loops and hoops
on the night, again in your gloved fist
on November the Fifth.
They’re goldfish
in their sad plastic bags at the fair,
you stood there. The words of poems
are coins in a poor man’s hat; the claws of a lost cat.
The words of poems are who you were.