The kids? In hindsight they would very much have appreciated a little bit of maverick.Ĭhildren transition quickly from feeling they own poetry, to feeling they are not entitled to enjoy poems or have a response to them, unless they first understand the text entirely. The parents definitely wouldn’t have thanked me. And the school wouldn’t have thanked me for it. I hadn’t the time to turn myself into a weak version of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.
I mean, of course I wanted the teenagers in my care to love poems, but they also had exams to pass so it seemed more important that they understood the material, could dissect it and spit back evaluations to an impatient examiner rather than having fun with words. I was a secondary-school English teacher for ten years before becoming a novelist and was guilty of not quite knowing how to teach poetry. I know I have pointed a very stiff finger, but I am fully prepared to count myself as an offender. Really the teachers who taught the teachers are to blame… ad infinitum. I will say this very quietly, in a nervous whisper: those teaching poetry are to blame. And this scares us.īut who is at fault? Come closer. Instead what happens is that poetry shifts from being art experienced with the heart to a form constrained to an intellectual pursuit. Is it the poetry that changes? Does it become less life-affirming the older the intended audience? Of course not. Teachers look equally horrified and pull out a stack of books to mark.īut why, quite universally and regardless of socio-economic background, this reaction? Why are eight-year olds receptive but fourteen-year olds and adults afraid, angry even? And why does this shift in attitude over time not occur with any other art form?Įveryone continues to enjoy visual arts, film, music, dance. I know the drill: when this topic is announced, teenagers roll their eyes and in some cases appear as though they would very much like to hurt me. I regularly speak in secondary schools, and am careful never to admit off the bat that I will be talking about the transformative power of poetry. Poetry is rarely the big seller in a bookshop.
The question from friends has been this: how will you convince people to read poems? And they do have a point. I write in verse and my first novel for adults, Here Is The Beehive, publishes this month.
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