June's Tip

Voume 101:1 Spring 2011 ...and Spirituality? 

Jo Shapcott’s sequence of six bee poems are inspired by Colony Collapse Disease. But they are also about the poet’s own health.  Read The Threshold, The Hive and/or CCD, and ask the class what they think the poem is saying about the poet’s own body (Shapcott’s latest collection, the Costa Prize-wining Of Mutability, charts her experience of and recovery from cancer). Discuss the strategy of writing about one thing in order to tell us about another (“extended metaphor”) and ask the students to write their own poem in which they tell us a secret through an extended metaphor of their own.

May's Tip

 Voume 101:1 Spring 2011 ...and Spirituality? 

Read the extract from Carole Satyamurti’s new translation of the Mahabharata.  Discuss epic: how it is an oral tradition. Ask class members to read stanzas aloud like a dialogue. If you have drama skills, workshop the text.  Now talk about religious poetry: the Koran read only in Arabic, because it is poetry, extracts from the Bible such as the Song of Solomon.  Discuss with the class what poetry adds to a religious text or an important story. 

April's Tip 

Volumne 101:1 Spring 2011 ...and Spirituality? 

In the second section of Michael Symmons Roberts’s essay, he talks about growing up near the US Air Base at Greenham Common. Using just this section of the essay (unless working with Years 12 and 13) ask the class to research Greenham Common and the protests later held there.  When they reconvene, ask how all of this is contained in the symbolism of the white ash falling from the sky?  Now broaden this out into a discussion of how symbol works: how it can condense many ideas and feelings into one image.  Ask the students, working in groups or singly, to create a symbol for a particular place in their own lives: the town, the school, the street where they live, the kitchen at home. If you plan to do a writing exercise with them, ask them to use this symbol as the basis of a poem or short memoir like Symmons Roberts’s.

March's Tip

Volume 100:4 Winter 2010 The Poet's Progress

‘The Poet’s Progress’ section is full of writers’ journals.  Bernardine Evaristo, who writes (among other things) fiction for young people, has given us her journal for ‘The Month of September’.  Ask students to read this themselves, underlining unusual vocabulary as they do.  Then discuss it. Ask them about the range of Evaristo’s vocabulary – from the arty (“schmoozing”, “Feldenkrais”) to the literary (“ellipsis”, “prosy”), the political (the section about the Daily Mail article) to the scatological (the quotation from Lara). What does this show about her command of language?  Is this how they imagine a writing life?  Does it sound enviable?  What does the final section suggest about how important motivation is?  Then ask students to keep a journal over a week.

(N.B. one of the three lines Evaristo quotes from her adult novel Lara employs strong language.)

February's Tip

Volume 100:4 Winter 2010 The Poet's Progress

Kim Moore’s ‘Tuesday at Wetherspoons’ makes the familiar seem a little strange – even though the similes she uses and the details she notes are nearly all drawn from the familiar world of the food.  Read the poem with the group and ask them how many food-related items they can find in it.

Discuss what food can be a symbol of – will-power, comfort, home, etc – and the ways in which, in this poem, the narrator seems uncomfortable with the foody scene she evokes.  Ask students, working in groups, to list some of their favourite food textures, and flavours. Then ask them, working alone, to write a “food mood” poem, which uses at least one of those textures or flavours listed to evoke a food-related feeling. 

(Clearly, there’s scope in this lesson to work with eating disorder issues, or culinary cultural diversity.)

January's Tip

Volume 100:4 Winter 2010 The Poet's Progress

‘Insomnia in Southern Illinois’, by John Burnside, takes its first line from the Edward Thomas poem ‘Out in the Dark’.  Read the Burnside poem, and then the Thomas (easily available on the web), with the group.  Discuss what the relationship of the new poem is to the older one.  Is it parody, a rip-off – or a homage?

Encourage the group to work out that John Burnside uses a flexible rhyme scheme, which settles by the fourth stanza into aabb, then moves out of that pattern and seems to unwind on the final “another”.  Why does he use this technique rather than something more regimented – is there a link with the “soft-focus” imagery of the poem?  Ask the group why “another” twice interrupts this rhyming soliloquy. (If there’s time, encourage the group to discuss the sensation of slippage the fast rhymes of the Thomas poem produce.) 

Ask the students to write a poem which starts, “Out in the dark, over the snow”.  Encourage them to think of this as their turn: they can have a contemporary, even an urban, setting, but to be a homage it needs to be a poem about their own state of mind on a recent, real-life snowy night.

December's Tip

Volume 100:3 Autumn 2010 Writing Home

Olivia Byard’s ‘Mappa Mundi’, though it describes the real mediaeval map, refers to various places which may or may not exist in the real world.  Divide the class into groups and give each the task of finding out about one of the places named.  As they report back, lead the class in a discussion of resonance: why has the poet picked these places from the Mappa Mundi?  What do they symbolise to her?  Byard uses the map as a metaphor for her life.  Bring (or Google!) a reproduction of the Mappa Mundi to the classroom and encourage students to decode some details.  Discussion and poem exercise: how would students describe their life in a metaphorical map?

November's Tip

Volume 100:3 Autumn 2010 Writing Home

The first poem of George Szirtes’s ‘Postcard: Tower’, ‘1. Tower’, does just what the title says.  Like a picture postcard, it shows us a view.  It’s also postcard-shaped, in this case because it’s a sonnet.  After discussing the poem and the scene it describes, ask students to write a postcard poem of their own: which describes a view and is postcard-shaped (probably not a sonnet, unless your group are sixth-formers who’ve made exceptional inroads!).  To take this further, discuss with students what kind of message they think would go on the back of Szirtes’s postcard.  Then ask them to write a poem to go on the reverse of their postcard – or of someone else’s.  What story will that message tell?  What persona is it written in?