Poetry Summit

Francesca Bonafede: Poetry Changes Lives

I remember vividly all the poems I have written, including my very first, at the age of six. It was about a seagull I once watched struggling to fly on a blustery day. In that scene, I somehow recognised my own condition. The very composition of that poem is burned into my mind. I remember the smell of the wooden table in the school library and the ticking noise of a white wall clock. The act of writing felt radical and empowering. Since writing ‘La Gabbianella’, poetry became for me a way to cope, a way to speak the unspeakable and share what often remains unshared. I always wrote in my free time, often in the evenings just before bed. As a teenager, I hated poetry at school. I was often in detention because I argued with the standard interpretations we were given. I wanted to hear and discuss poetry. Circling words in silence and writing notes in the margins felt like a real waste.

During my time with the National Literacy Trust, I witnessed the radical moment of empowerment I experienced with the composition of ‘La Gabbianella’ in many children and young people on the Young Poets programme. It manifests as a spark of excitement and pride in the eyes of the young poets at the realisation of infinite possibilities: ‘this sounds great, I meant it and I wrote it’. More often than not this happens in children and young people who believed poetry was ‘not for them’.

This year, we partnered with the West Yorkshire Local Authority to design and deliver a very ambitious programme aiming to inspire all children in West Yorkshire to write for enjoyment and see poetry as a way to amplify their voices and build their confidence. We will also be appointing West Yorkshire’s first-ever Young Poets Laureate (one in year 4 and one in year 9)!

I have the honour and privilege of working on this with Bradford poet Sharena Lee Satti. Sharena and I share the unshakeable belief in the power that poetry has to truly change the lives of children and young people. She generously shares her amazing but challenging story with all the children and young people she works with and often begins by saying: ‘It was poetry, and writing poetry that saved my life in many ways.’ Sharena left school at the age of 12 to become a carer. Hers was a deeply personal practice that allowed her, she said, to access ‘the magic within herself’. She too engaged with poetry away from school life.

Every year since 2005, the National Literacy Trust has found that children on free school meals are more likely to engage with poetry in their free time than their better-off peers. The consistency of these findings is even more meaningful in such a challenging socio-economic landscape. Poetry has the potential to play an important role in the lives of children and young people and become a tool to support mental wellbeing, process struggles and make sense of the world.

At the National Literacy Trust, we will continue to support children and young people to develop poetry writing for enjoyment practices with the radical view that every young person is a poet.

Francesca Bonafede

Francesca leads the development and delivery of the Young Writers programme at the National Literacy Trust. Young Writers inspires children and young people to write for enjoyment and improve the quality of their writing. Francesca holds a PhD in the phenomenology of literary language and is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She has visiting teaching duties in Higher Education and is the editor of a peer-reviewed literary theory journal.

National Literacy Trust
https://literacytrust.org.uk

Author and Educator

Cheryl Moskowitz: Translation as Transportation, Liberation and Connection

Translation as transportation, liberation and connection

Writing poetry, no matter what language it is written in, always involves a sort of translation. In the first instance, that is the translation of feeling and experience into words. To translate a poem written in one language into another requires further transportation but the reward is that we gain access to feelings and experiences that might be very different from, or sometimes surprisingly similar to our own.

The verb ‘translate’ comes from the old French translater meaning to carry over or transport. I like the idea of translating as a kind of transportation. Like moving house, going on an adventure, or being magically beamed from one world to another.

Much of the work I do in schools as a poet involves me in some way as a creative translator. Some translators speak other languages, however creative translation does not require you to be a linguist. In her recent publication ‘Letters on Liberty’ for the Academy of Ideas, translator and academic Vanessa Pupavac says ‘translation is for all’ and suggests that ‘most of us should take up the liberty of translating or retranslating against our habitual language limits and enhance our liberty of expression.’

Freedom of creative expression has been very much in the news recently in the wake of the recent shocking attack on author Salman Rushdie at a NY event where he was about to speak on that very subject. This comes at a time when, one year into Taliban rule, girls and young women in Afghanistan are still barred from attending secondary school.

Everyone has the human right to express themselves, and Article 13 of the UNCRC makes it clear that this includes children and young people. People should be able to express themselves regardless of their religion, culture or beliefs and they may express themselves in all kinds of different ways as long as they do not do so in a way that causes injury or harm to another. What constitutes injury is of course not always clear but artistic freedom depends on that fact that we do not have to agree with, or even like what is being said by another. Indeed, there can be a great deal of value arising from debate and criticism that comes from engagement with ideas and thoughts that might be profoundly different from our own.

Currently I am in the early stages of developing an exciting creative translation project with the Stephen Spender Trust focussing on Ukraine – over the coming academic year I will be running workshops in schools around the UK working with students to produce their own English translations of poetry written by Ukrainian authors for children. I am working together with a Ukrainian translator in Lviv to source texts and put together materials in preparation for the workshops.

It is a delight to be introduced to the range of poetry being read by children at the moment in Ukraine and in particular the poems that the translator and her children are drawn to in the midst of the Russia-Ukraine war. I can’t wait to see the creative translations produced in response by children in the UK.

Creative translation in poetry doesn’t just involve creating new versions of existing poems but can also involve dialoguing with poets and bringing your own perspective to bear on their work as I have done here with the brilliant young Afghan poet Aryan Ashory. https://ypn.poetrysociety.org.uk/features/

Creative translation can also be a way for multi-lingual families and communities to create a new shared language of poetry together. You can see some lovely examples here in response to my ‘Poems from Home’ initiative for the Stephen Spender Trust. https://www.stephen-spender.org/poems-from-home/

As well as raising the profile of multilingualism, enriching the teaching of modern foreign languages at school and boosting literacy, Creative translation in the classroom (CTiC) promotes collaborative learning, develops intercultural interest and awareness and raises creative aspiration. In a world where conflict between nations is rife and cultural differences continue to spark horrible violence and hate between peoples, creative translation through poetry can work to connect us.

Click to access Creative-Translation-in-the-Classroom-Report-Jan-19.pdf

Cheryl Moskowitz

Cheryl Moskowitz is a poet. educator and creative translator. She writes for adults and children, runs workshops regularly in schools and is passionate about getting teachers and pupils to write their own poems. She runs writing projects in a wide variety of community settings often working with the most disadvantaged and vulnerable. www.cherylmoskowitz.com

Uncategorized

Ana Sampson: On Trees and Poems

On Trees and Poems

They cut down a tree on our road this week.

My daughters and I were sad, and cross. Although already we couldn’t quite remember the exact shape and character of the tree – the branches had been efficiently disposed of, only the stump remained – we were bereft. It had been a kindly tree, throwing green shade over a bench on which people and dogs and occasionally the street’s reigning cat, Binky, sat to watch the world go by.

My six year old ran up to the stump, to its shocking new bright flat top, and hugged it. And then my nine year old joined her, and they made me do it too (although I might have done it anyway.) We counted its rings, and we missed it. I’m sure we looked deeply eccentric, but I’m also sure that any one of our neighbours, seeing that stark and sliced trunk, would have understood the response. Perhaps some of them might even have joined in.

It is difficult to write about trees without writing poetry. They are a wonderful example of an everyday object that can be transfigured by the kind of close attention you have to pay to something in order to write about it. What I love most about poetry is the new ways of looking at the world it offers us. Children, whose perspectives are fresher and less calcified than ours, instinctively respond to this. And when you ask them to look – to really look – at something, they will surprise and delight you with their responses.

In order to write a poem about a tree, you need to have a very good look at it… and they are magic. You need to watch and think about the movement of the leaves, to listen to the whisper of the boughs and the chattering of the squirrels. It’s important to stroke the bark, lie stretched out beneath it and look up into its canopy, inhale its scent, give it a hug. You may have walked past it a thousand times, but it might still be a tree whose shape you wouldn’t be able to recall if it was suddenly gone.

Children build kingdoms among the trees. Whether we clambered high into the branches or looked for fairies or beetles among the roots, trees were our playgrounds. We hoarded their treasures, gathered from the parks and pavements: glossy conkers, sycamore spinners, cherry stones, acorn cups for tiny feasts, tumbled blossom, sticky buds to uncurl in a milk bottle. They furnished us with swords, pilgrims’ staffs and magic wands. They were milestones and boundaries, and a certain well-loved tree might have been – might still be – the landmark that tells us: “You are home.”

Within my private forest of remembered trees stand a friendly magnolia, regularly scrambled up in childhood, and the horse chestnut – in my mind, always bearing its pale candles – visible from a window I last gazed from decades ago. Further in, a hilltop monkey puzzle stretches its sinuous fingers, an ancient oak spreads, and every Christmas tree I have ever loved (which is all of them, perhaps especially the scrawny ones) shines. I also have trees immortalised by poets and writers in my mental forest: from nursery rhyme nut trees to Shakespeare’s bare ruin’d choirs, from Housman’s lovely cherry to Hopkins’ Binsey Poplars.

We need trees and we need people who will plant them, not cut them down. It’s why Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris included Willow, Acorn and Conker in the beautiful spell book The Lost Words, incantations for words excised from the children’s dictionary due to underuse. To lie, once in a while, under a tree and look up through its leaves is a pure and primeval kind of medicine. It is an incredible gift to be able to give and, even for those of us whose days in the classroom are far behind us, a lesson we could all do with learning.

Ana Sampson

Ana Sampson is the editor of, among other anthologies, Wonder: The Natural History Poetry Book (Macmillan Children’s Books) which contains some lovely poems about trees.

Children's Poet

Roger Stevens: Making Books

Occasionally we repost a particularly good blog – this week we have an updated blog from a few years ago, by Roger Stevens, all about making books!

Making Books

I know very few poets who do not want their work to be published. Poetry is not the solitary communication with the Muse that it is sometimes thought to be. We poets are driven to express ourselves. We want to tell people how we feel. We want to share our writing journey. We want to show off.

For many of us, particularly those of us who write for children, this desire to share stretches much further than seeing our work in print. We also want to work with those young readers we are trying to reach.

As I often tell teachers when I visit schools to give performances and workshops, we are not trying to teach children how to be poets. We are helping them to improve their writing skills, to write creatively, to communicate and to express themselves, and to enjoy using words.

Of course, we want to pass on a love for poetry and thus motivate young readers to write. And we often succeed, our workshops producing a plethora of poems. And then what? Maybe the children read them to the class, maybe they go straight into folders – often that is it!

But why should these young poets feel differently to we older ones? Perhaps they would like their work to be published, too; to share their poems, not just with their classmates, but with the school, their family and the wider world.

We often see lovely displays in the classroom, in the school hall, in the school entrance hall and even in the local library. But one of the best and most satisfying ways to share poems is to make a book.

So please take note all teachers, but also anyone who has, or knows, talented children who write poetry – parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, family friends. This is a great way to help these youngsters share their work.

I had a residency in a Basildon school for a few years. It consisted of one morning a week for one term with one Year 4 class. At the beginning of one term I announced we would write a book. I gave everyone in the class a free notebook, to start making notes and jotting down ideas. I explained that they didn’t have to share anything in the book if they didn’t want to. It would be private and personal to them. A couple of the children lost their books, a couple wrote nothing, but most of the children filled their books with all sorts of things, just as a ‘real’ writer would. We chose animals as a theme. And each week began working on different styles of animal poems.

Towards the end of the term we chose an editorial team, gathered together the best class illustrators, assembled a production group and lastly a sales team. We aimed to mirror the way a ‘real’ book would be made and marketed. We used the ‘old-fashioned’ cut and paste method. Poems were written on, or transferred to, computer and edited. Then printed. Then, finally, poems were cut out with scissors and assembled on the pages. Illustrators illustrated. We gave the book a title – My Name is Fire, wrote a blurb, invented a publishing house and decided to sell the books for £1 each – the money going to Comic Relief.

My Name Is Fire

The whole process was brilliant fun, the children loved it. There was so much creative energy. They were thrilled with the final product, everyone had at least one poem in the book, we photocopied 100 copies (it was cheaper than printing them). We sold every copy! And the book was a permanent reminder of the fun we had and the creative skills of the class.

I was telling this to a group of children at our local children’s book shop (the Book Nook) and a girl in the audience, Evelyn, aged 9, took it to heart. She went home and wrote a book of her own poems – The Magic of Poetry (illustrated with the help of her Dad, using images from the internet). She sold the books at £1 a time and sold 350 copies for Children in Need. I’m very pleased to say that I have a copy signed by the author herself.

I also love making small books. If I have a class for a day we can go through the whole book-making process from beginning to end. We write a poem. The book is A6 size, folded in half. The text is written on a single sheet of A6 paper folded in half, making four pages. The cover is a piece of A6 card, also folded in half. We write a blurb, invent a publishing house, make a dedication, add a pretend barcode, write a biography and so on. At the end we have 30 or so tiny books, and a whole new class library.

20220629_172014

Making home-made books is not just for children. If you’re an adult writer you can join in too! Either by using the photocopy method or splashing out and paying to have your work published by a small Press. Indeed, there’s a rich and noble history of writers, particularly poets, self-publishing their work. You must just be wary of vanity publishing – publishers who will tell you that your poem is akin to Wordsworth’s best and will offer to publish it (along with probably five hundred others) and charge you an exorbitant sum for doing so.

When I first began visiting schools as a poet, I’d had several poems published in anthologies, but I did not yet have a collection of my own work. So I self-published my own book, Never Trust a Lemon, to take into schools to share and sell. Nearly 25 years and 40 ‘real’ books later, Lemon is still one of my favourites and still sells!

Making books, especially with children, is great fun, and very rewarding for all who are involved.

Roger Stevens

Website for students and teachers: PoetryZone

Twitter: @poetryzone

Roger Stevens has had nearly 40 books published: novels, numerous solo poetry collections and edited poetry collections. When not writing, he visits schools, libraries and festivals performing his work and running workshops for young people and teachers. He is a National Poetry Day Ambassador for the Forward Arts Foundation, a founding member of the Able Writers scheme with Brian Moses; and of course runs the award-winning and most excellent poetry website PoetryZone.

Children's Poet

Sue Hardy-Dawson: What is Poetry?

Perhaps you’re already a fan of poetry? As you’re reading a poetry blog, it’s a fair assumption. However, undeniably, it remains the marmite of literature. Why? I suspect part of the problem is that unlike other models for writing it’s hard to define exactly what a poem is.

It’s true there are many different forms and styles of poetry, as many as poets past and present have and continue to think up. In fact, poetry by its very nature welcomes experimentation and innovation. BUT, whilst it’s a wonderful open field to play for poets, it can feel a bit daunting to those, as yet unconvinced, endeavouring to teach it.

Like all else it requires first and foremost a degree of immersion. Even if you have read and yes reread at least some if not a lot of poems by different poets contemporary and historical, a satisfying definition that fits all models, much less how to write poetry, remains elusive. Add to this an educational zeitgeist of deconstruction and poetry risks becoming a fearfully complex thing. Right?

No, it doesn’t need to be. Naturally, as a poet, I know a fair amount about poetry. Yet, like every child everywhere, almost all I know I learnt a long time after I began writing it. My first poems were largely mimicking poetry I’d enjoyed. I’m grateful my youthful attention wasn’t required to identify similes, metaphors or alliteration. Not, at least, until secondary school and university.

So here’s the thing, poetry needn’t be scary, you can know very little about its constructs and still embark on a joint voyage of enjoying poetry with children. The single most important teaching tool you can bring to the party is a genuine passion. Better still you can experiment and invent your own rules. There are no poetry police or they would have carted me away at birth. So poetry provides endless opportunities for wild creativity. You can arrange it solely by syllable counts, write it rhymed or unrhymed, play with and have lots of punctuation, or none at all. You can mimic other forms of writing. There’s very little a poem cannot be from an epic to a single word.

‘Ah’ you say, (well probably not you, but many teachers and parents I’ve come across) ‘but I don’t like poetry.’ And who can blame you? We’ve all felt dislike for something. The book we dread at bedtime, the irritating song you find yourself tragically humming on the bus. For me it’s competitive sports and computer games. I understand. So, if you aren’t already, can I ever make a poetry fan of you? Well, I believe it’s possible. Familiarity is key and it doesn’t even lead to contempt.

Consider opera, music’s marmite, yet after the world cup who hasn’t found themselves humming Nessun Dorma? If not launching into full-blown song in the bathroom and scaring the neighbours? Just me then? Nevertheless, it proves we can all learn to love new things and, if we don’t have to be experts in Italian or opera to feel opera’s joy, why not poetry?

So if you don’t like or are even fearful of teaching poetry, children’s poetry is a good place to start. It’s accessible and often fun. Don’t let poetry become just an exercise in studying language, though, let contextual osmosis work its magic, learn poems as you would a song. Watch videos of poets performing or go and see one live. Why? Because enthusiasm is addictive and children have inbuilt primeval, adult-engagement sensors. Open their hearts and love – and even understanding – will grow on its own.

Sue Hardy-Dawson

Sue Hardy Dawson is a poet & illustrator. Her debut collection, ‘Where Zebras Go’, Otter Barry Books, was shortlisted for the 2018 CLiPPA prize. Sue’s poems and teaching resources can be found on the CLPE website. Her second, ‘Apes to Zebras’ Bloomsbury, co-written with poetry ambassadors, Roger Stevens and Liz Brownlee, won the North Somerset Teachers Book Awards. As a dyslexic poet, she loves encouraging reluctant readers and writers. Her second solo collection ‘If I were Other than Myself’ is out now with Troika Books.

Children's Poet

Laura Mucha: In the Face of Uncertainty

Here is another look at a favourite, and still pertinent blog from 2020:

I was hit by a car when I was 29. I was left virtually bedbound for years and after six months or so, I found myself writing poetry. Somehow, it was a place where I could process thoughts and feelings, a code that allowed me to access parts of me that were otherwise out of bounds.

I also devoured poems. I read this excerpt of a poem called New Every Morning by Susan Coolidge every day for at least two years:

Every day is a fresh beginning;

Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain,

And, spite of old sorrow and older sinning,

And puzzles forecasted and possible pain,

Take heart with the day, and begin again.

In the face of the stress and uncertainty of the global pandemic, I wanted to use poetry to help young people process what was going on and express themselves. Normally I would work face-to-face with them, getting them to improvise, come up with words and lines, vote on changes and perform – but as we were in lockdown, I had to figure out how to do all of these things via little boxes on a screen.

In my first session, 7-11 year olds were coming up with lines like ‘I’m going to use all the bog roll’, ‘get me out of here’ and ‘my dad’s talking about Boris’. It was fascinating to see how the pandemic was impacting them and help them articulate that in a poem. They told me they appreciated the chance to have a voice, collaborate, be creative and learn – and many parents said that this was the highlight of their children’s lockdown.

I decided to run a series of workshops to co-write a thank you poem for key workers. I enlisted the help of a brilliant friend of mine, Ed Ryland, who normally produces some of the best TV on our screens. I advertised free poetry workshops, messaged everyone I could think of – from every school I’d ever visited to friends I hadn’t seen in years – and prepared a Powerpoint outlining who key workers are and what they do. And off we went.

More than fifty young people role-played, imagined being different key workers, thought about how they would feel, what they would be doing, what difference they would make. And they wrote everything down, sharing hundreds of words in a couple of minutes. I collated them all with the help of teaching assistant and poet, Meg Fairclough, then we worked as a group to create a first draft.

I spent the weekend reflecting and editing (filming my editing so I could share this in the next workshop) and asked for comments from my agent, editor, and four professional children’s poets. In the following session, I showed all of this to the young writers and asked them to vote on the suggestions. “It’s your poem,” I said. “Only accept the comments you agree with.” They rejected many… Then we discussed what costumes or props they had, allocated lines and planned how we would perform the poem.

One thousand videos later – and countless emails and calls with Ed and numerous parents – and we had a film. More than 80 children from the UK, US, Australia, China, Italy and Uruguay took part. It had thousands of views in a couple of hours and made its way onto CBBC’s Newsround.

I know I’m a poetry evangelist. But poems are an invaluable way to process and communicate – particularly in times of difficulty. And as difficulty looks like it will be here for a while, I will continue to evangelise.

Poetry is important. And poetry is for everyone. So please write it.

Laura Mucha

Laura Mucha has won two international prizes for children’s poetry (the Caterpillar Prize and the YorkMix Prize) and her poems have been featured on BBC Radio 6 Music, BBC Radio 3, Classic FM and CBBC.

Her debut non-fiction book, Love Factually / We Need to Talk About Love (Bloomsbury) was published last year and Richard Curtis describes it as ‘much better and more useful than my film’. Her debut collection, Dear Ugly Sisters (Otter-Barry Books) is out in August, and her debut picture book, Rita’s Rabbit (Faber & Faber) in 2021. You can read more of her work at lauramucha.com. @lauramucha

Books for Keeps

Andrea Reece: Everyone’s a Winner

Everyone’s a winner

The Newbery Award is one hundred years old this year. Reading an article about the award and its 100 winners got me thinking about prizes, their importance and impact. I should say that prizes have been a big part of my professional life (though, sadly, not as a recipient). Publishers I’ve worked for have sponsored prizes; authors I’ve published have won them. I’ve been a judge myself (Costa Children’s Book Award 2015 – a big year). I’ve been part of the team behind the Branford Boase Award since 2012 and am currently running the Klaus Flugge Prize. And, most pertinent here, I’m delighted to say that this will be my third year working for CLPE on the publicity and promotion for the CLiPPA, the UK’s leading annual award for published poetry for children. Put it all together, and that’s a lot of judging sessions observed, and a great deal of applauding, not to mention lots of opportunities to ponder who prizes are for, and what they can do.

The Newbery anniversary has sparked debate around the list of winners and not all of its 100 winning books are recommended reading for today. Times change, taste and sensibilities with them of course, but it’s true too that anyone who’s participated in an award will be conscious of excellent nominees who, because of some one thing, failed to make the final list. Then too, if there can only be one winner, surely there must be four or five disappointed shortlistees too.

Well, no. Because to see a prize as only being about its winner really misses the point. As an expert, here are five glorious things I’ve realised are true of all prizes.

The judges. Every literary prize I’ve ever observed (and this is particularly true of the CLiPPA) had as its panel of judges a group of informed, enthusiastic and engaged people, ready to share their opinions honestly, to listen to their fellow judges, and to determine the very best qualities in each collection they were considering.
That excitement and passion is then shared with the public, bringing a whole new audience to books, poetry collections and poems that they would not otherwise have discovered.
The best shortlists – and again, this is particularly true of the CLiPPA but it’s also true of the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prizes – do more than just showcase what is on the list. They highlight exactly what is happening in the field at the time, new and important developments, what is exciting the best practitioners of the moment. How cheering it is for example to see Manjeet Mann’s verse novel The Crossing on the shortlist for this year’s Costa Book Award, and then to see it win the category – the first time in the award’s history that the children’s prize has gone to a verse novel.
No matter how often we think that surely everything there is to say or think has been said, thought or described, prizes put the spotlight on new and original work, reminding us all of the boundless capacity of human imagination.
And finally, the celebrations are for everyone. Michael Rosen was named winner of the 2021 CLiPPA but on the day of the announcement, didn’t it feel as though everyone was talking about children’s poetry? How glorious was that!

Even as I write this, submissions are coming in for the 2022 CLiPPA – publishers, there’s still time if you have yet to put your books forward – and entries are also pouring in for the much-loved CLiPPA Shadowing, the scheme that prompts poetry performances in schools up and down the country. I can’t wait to share the announcement of this year’s shortlist and the celebrations of the very best new poetry books for children.

Andrea Reece

Andrea Reece is Managing Editor of Books for Keeps and reviews editor for Lovereading4Kids. She’s also director of the Children’s Programme for the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival. As administrator and publicist for prizes the CLiPPA, Branford Boase Award and Klaus Flugge Prize, she knows how to keep a secret and enforce an embargo.

Children's Poet

Joshua Seigal: Poetry and Philosophy

I often tell people that one of the things that attracts me to poetry is that poems tend to be short. In 2011, I completed a 30,000 word thesis as part of my Philosophy postgraduate degree. The thesis was edited down from about 50,000 words. That is not short. Aside from the obvious matter of length, there is the corollary issue of time. One should not underestimate the time it can take to complete a poem, but it is much shorter than it takes to write a philosophical tract. This suits me because I tend to work in short, intense bursts. In part, my deciding to dedicate myself to poetry can be seen as something of a reaction against my previous life in academia.

Another thing I am often asked about is the extent to which my background in philosophy influences my poetry. One can take this at least two ways: do I write about the same sorts of things? And how similar is the writing process? Let’s take each of these in turn. Philosophy purports to concern itself with the deepest questions: Why are we here? What is reality? How can we come to know reality? When I first started to write poetry for children my main aim was to provide a bit of a giggle. This, again, was probably a reaction against having to tackle the ‘big questions’ in my day job. However, as the pandemic has progressed my poetry has certainly taken on a philosophical edge. In fact, I have probably started to think about the big issues with more gusto than I ever did as an academic.

How, though, have I been tackling these issues? This brings us onto the second question, regarding the extent to which writing poetry and writing philosophy are similar. For me, there are huge differences, and it is these differences that attract me to the former rather than the latter. When Philosophers write, they tend to lay out an argument meticulously, examine it from all angles, consider counterarguments, and advance slowly and cautiously toward a conclusion. And the conclusion in any one essay is almost always nothing more than a tiny grain of sand added to the great mound of what has gone before. Indeed, most of the work I studied was concerned with minute details of the big issues, rather than the issues themselves as a whole. I think this was one of the things that frustrated me: Anglophone Philosophers, in what is known as the ‘Analytic’ tradition, often tend to be details people, rather than big-picture people.

As a poet, I don’t look for conclusions, and I don’t progress by way of ‘argument’. I try to open up a snapshot, or a window, through which the big issues can be viewed, however dimly. I proceed by way of allusion and metaphor, or else I simply tell it as I see it; in neither case is the goal to convince someone to adopt my point of view, and in neither case am I trying to add anything to a collective body of knowledge. I am simply adopting and describing a point of view. The point of view might pertain to issues like love, goodness, knowledge and truth. Or I may simply be describing how my cat was sick on the rug. I am pleased I did my time as an academic, and I am even more pleased now to not be doing it. And given that I am not doing it, I am going to leave this ‘essay’ without an elegant conclusion.

(please vote for me in the People’s Book Prize. It takes twenty seconds: https://peoplesbookprize.com/summer-2021/yapping-away/)

Joshua Seigal

Joshua Seigal is a poet, performer and workshop leader based in London. His latest collection, Welcome To My Crazy Life, is published by Bloomsbury, and he was the recipient of the 2020 Laugh Out Loud Book Award. Please visit http://www.joshuaseigal.co.uk for more info.

Christmas Poems

Christmas Poems: Merry Christmas!

Thank you to Sue for our lovely Robin introduction, and to the other wonderful children’s poets who have sent poems for our Christmas blog 2021. We’d also like to thank all those who have supported us by sending fascinating and illuminating blogs this year.

Angel Dance

…………………………………

See the shepherds with the sheep,

Not one dares to make a peep,

Tonight, no one will go to sleep,

The angels dance above.

…………………………

See the trees turn golden, bright,

The hills are flooded with pure light,

And all feel warm this cold, cold night,

The angels dance above.

…………………………….

See the glint in every eye,

No one asks the question why

Heaven has flooded Earth’s dark sky,

The angels dance above.

………………………………

Coral Rumble

Christmas morning

♥

Last year

on Christmas morning

we got up really early

and took the dog for a walk

across the downs

It wasn’t snowing

but the hills were white with frost

and our breath froze

in the air

♥

Judy rushed around like a crazy
thing

as though Christmas

meant something special to her

♥

The sheep huddled together

looking tired

as if they’d been up all night

watching the stars

♥

We stood at the highest point

and thought about what Christmas means

and looked over the white hills

and looked up at the blue sky

♥

And the hills seemed

to go on forever

and the sky had no bounds

and you could imagine

a world at peace

♥

Roger Stevens

Illustration by Chris Riddell, from *THINGS YOU FIND IN A POET’S BEARD* (Burning Eye)

A Christmas Poem

When my Great Aunt Bertha,
who was a Quaker,
read in the papers
of how their boys and our boys gave it all up,
put the guns down
and climbed over the top
to kick the patched leather ball
between barbed wire and crater rims,
between the two straight dark ditches they lived in,
she took it upon herself to head down to Woolworth’s
and buy up all the marked down boxes of Christmas cards,
lolling on the January shelves.

She spent her war years licking stamps,
inking addresses,
printing xmas messages in one of a number of different languages,
as appropriate,
signing her love
and visiting the pillar-box at the head of her road.
Sacks of the things went off at once,
whole stretches of trench filled with spade-handled robins,
holly, magi, stockings and snow.
The babe of peace arrived in his manger,
in the stable,
in March, in April, in May,
ceaselessly,
year on year.

If there had been no calendars,
no officers, no orders,
no today’s or yesterday’s newspaper in the mess,
in the trench,
no date on the soldier’s letter from home,
then her plan may have worked,
assuming the other side were equally ill-equipped
and open-mindedly eager to clutch peace as it passed.

But
no one was stupid enough to think it might be Christmas
every day,
no one was fooled by her hand,
and besides, the ball
needed pumping
and a puncture repair kit.
Great Aunt Bertha.

A.F. Harrold

Christmas dawn

brings frost

in fields.

Sheep seek

one patch

where sunlight creeps,

and stand

– quite still –

on a Cotswold hillside.

Woolly backs

steam;

shadows stretch.

Fingers of friendly light

linger

as frosted grass

turns green.

Pie Corbett

Children's Poetry in the US

Janet Wong: The Children’s Poetry Scene in America: A Recap of #NCTE21

In late November, I attended the NCTE (ncte.org) convention. This conference is one of the most important annual events for children’s authors in America, where we talk about our books with thousands of teachers who work at all levels, preschool through university. There are always dozens of poetry sessions. To give you a sense of the content we share, here is a description of one of the sessions I participated in.

Equity in Poetry: Celebrating Diverse Voices in Verse
Three award-winning poets — Janet Wong, Elizabeth Steinglass, and Carole Boston Weatherford — will share poems that embrace the call for equity. In addition, we will invite audience participation with strategies that promote greater equity with movement, sign language, choral reading, visuals, music, and other tools as we co-create equitable literacy learning experiences together.

This session was hosted by Sylvia Vardell, a professor of children’s literature in Texas and one of America’s top experts on poetry. Each year in January on her Poetry for Children blog, she features a “sneak peek” list of the hundred-plus children’s poetry books that will be published that year. And all through the year, you can read interviews and book summaries, enjoy minute-long “poem movies,” and more: http://poetryforchildren.blogspot.com/.

For decades, Sylvia has been urging educators all over the world, from Athens to Auckland to Austin, to embrace the brevity and accessibility of poetry. She believes — as we all do — that poetry has the power to reach every reader, but not just because of the form or content of a poem. In anthologies that she and I have created together, such as The Poetry Friday Anthology for Celebrations, The Poetry of Science, and GREAT MORNING: Poems for School Leaders to Read Aloud (please see https://pomelobooks.com/), she always includes “Poetry PLUS”— additional materials that extend the learning along with suggestions for sharing poems in a lively way. As she pointed out in the resources in HOP TO IT: Poems to Get You Moving and also in this NCTE session, we can use movement, sign language, choral reading, visuals, and other techniques when we read a poem to create a level playing field for learning.

In addition to showcasing poetry in programs by authors and educators, another reason that NCTE has become the professional home of many American children’s poets (and poetry fans) is its poetry awards. I received the 2021 Excellence in Poetry for Children Award, a lifetime achievement award that has been given to Paul Janeczko, J. Patrick Lewis, Marilyn Nelson, Joyce Sidman, Marilyn Singer, and others. For a mini-lesson on children’s poetry in America, you can click here (and scroll down): https://ncte.org/awards/excellence-in-poetry-for-children-living-american-poet/.

NCTE also highlights thirty poetry books (collections, anthologies, and verse novels) on its annual Poetry Notables list; my book Good Luck Gold & MORE was lucky enough to be included on the current list. Here are excerpts of a poem, prose piece, and discussion questions taken from its pages.

Former First Lady Michelle Obama emphasized in her opening keynote speech for #NCTE21 that “it’s harder to hate up close.” In the closing keynote speech, poet Amanda Gorman said, “Writing — telling truthful stories that matter — is an essential service for humanity.” And in America, this is what many of us children’s poets are focusing on today: how to make our country (and the world) a better place, one poem at a time.

A note about #NCTE21: Originally planned as an in-person conference in Louisville, Kentucky, the decision was made to shift to a virtual online format in the summer before the conference as COVID-19 surged again in the United States. I’ve attended the annual NCTE conference almost twenty times in person, with a thousand good memories; but, oddly, I felt an even stronger sense of community with this virtual format. All throughout the talks that I gave and attended, people chatted, responding immediately to the content with questions and feedback. It felt to me that we were sitting together in the same room, though photos posted on social media showed people in many different settings: lounging on the couch with cats in front of their screens, munching on samosas, or sitting on their balconies as they watched. As much as I keep hearing people say that they hope we can return to in-person conferences very soon, I hope we’ll always keep a virtual element at future conferences. At #NCTE21, people logged in from all over the world. Making global participation easy is something that justifies—actually, mandates—keeping a virtual element for future in-person conferences. Fingers crossed that we see (or at least “see”) each other at #NCTE22 in Anaheim, California. Disneyland, anyone?

Janet Wong

Janet Wong is the author of more than 35 books for children and teens. Her most recent book (with Sylvia Vardell and 25 poets) is THINGS WE DO, an alphabet anthology; 100% of the profits from this book will be donated to the IBBY Children in Crisis Fund https://www.ibby.org/awards-activities/ibby-children-in-crisis-fund