Editorial Director

Gaby Morgan: Cats

Cats

I spent a long time thinking about what this blog would be about – most of it thinking about poems of hope and consolation, and some of it thinking about poems about spring, but in the end it turned out that what I was writing about was cats. I have two cats who are fond of me, but not each other, and both well into middle age. They have been very attentive while I have been at home. The Orange Cat sits by my computer as I work, next to me on the sofa as I read and follows me around in the garden digging up all of the things I have just planted. The Blue Cat – asks for food and sleeps on my bed. We serve our purpose for him.

I have enjoyed seeing all the photos and videos of other people’s pets on social media and during work video calls. I probably know more about my author’s pets than any other part of their lives, and the very first author pet that I met belonged to Charles Causley. He had a magnificent ginger cat called Rupert. Rupert was an excellent correspondent and I still have photos and postcards that he sent me. When I was compiling Read Me: A Poem for Every Day of the Year Charles suggested that I include a poem by his friend A. L. Rowse called The White Cat of Trenarren. It is sublime and begins:

 

‘He was a mighty hunter in his youth

At Polmear all day on the mound, on the pounce

For anything moving, rabbit or bird or mouse –

My cat and I grow old together.’

 

Charles wrote about cats too – from I Had A Little Cat in which our narrator takes his cat Tim Tom Tay to market to sell but ends up bringing him home again:

 

‘But when the people came to buy

I saw such a look in Tim Tom’s eye

That it was clear as clear could be

I couldn’t sell Tim for a fortune’s fee.’

 

To In Sam Remo about Edward Lear’s cat Foss:

 

‘Deep in the garden of the Villa Tennyson,

Under a Fig tree, end of the orange walk

(Where, in his life, he’d often sprawl and snooze)

Lies the good gatto Foss, for sixteen years

Daily companion of Edward Lear.’

 

I was lucky enough to work on a few of Robert Westall’s books – and happily look after Blitzcat and The Machine Gunners to this day. Robert loved cats and always had several – he wrote in a letter to a friend ‘Cats to me are one of life’s great and certain plusses. When I get angry with God I can forgive him because he made cats – a divine and beautiful joke.’ He put together Cats Whispers and Tales: A Treasury of Stories and Poems as a tribute to them. This was also the book that introduced me to the magnificent Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart, which begins ‘For I will consider my cat Jeoffry’,

 

‘For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.

For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.

For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.

For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.

For he can swim for life.

For he can creep.’

 

… and Pangur Bán (the scholar and his cat), an old Irish poem, written in the ninth century at or around Reichenau Abbey. I like to imagine the monk hard at work illuminating a manuscript with his white cat looking on. It begins:

 

I and Pangur Ban my cat,
‘Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
‘Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill-will,
He too plies his simple skill.

 

And ends:

 

Practice every day has made

Pangur perfect in his trade;

I get wisdom day and night

Turning darkness into light.’

 

I would love to hear what your favourite cat poems are.

 

Gaby Morgan

 

Gaby Morgan is an Editorial Director at Macmillan Children’s Books and proud curator of the Macmillan Children’s Poetry List. She has compiled many bestselling anthologies including Read Me and Laugh: A Funny Poem for Every Day of the Year, Poems from the First World War, Poems for Love, Fairy Poems – which was short-listed for the CLPE Award – and A Year of Scottish Poems.

Uncategorized

Becky Fisher: My first memory of a poem – and the three things it taught me.

My very first memory of poetry is being taught a poem that my mum herself had learned off-by-heart as a student at university. ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’, a short poem of just nine lines, has a wonderful story of its own: it came to the poet, Caedmon, in a dream, after he fled a party at which he was supposed to perform. Caedmon, you see, is terrified of speaking in front of people, and so he slips out of the party before his turn comes around. He falls asleep, and is visited by a mysterious figure who tells him to sing of “the beginning of all things”. To Caedmon’s surprise, the words start flowing and he is able to perform his poem to all the other monks. There’s one more interesting fact about this poem that you need to know: it’s written in Old English, the language spoken in England between (roughly) the sixth and twelfth century.

In hearing Caedmon’s story and his poem, I learned three important things:

1) You can experience a poem without understanding it

The language of Old English feels familiar to us in its rhythms and sounds, but it’s not easy to understand the words themselves. Our vocabulary and pronunciation has changed so much over the intervening centuries that we can’t just jump into an Old English poem and get it right away.

But I found that that doesn’t really matter. In fact, the experience of letting the sounds wash over me, and of learning to form those unfamiliar words with my own mouth, was an enjoyable and valid experience in itself. Perhaps you could try listening to a poem read in a language not your own: what can you understand from the pace, the rhythm, the music of the words as you listen?

2) Inspiration can strike unexpectedly

Caedmon’s inspiration comes to him in a completely unexpected way. We might not all be so lucky as to resolve our writer’s block thanks to a dream of a mysterious stranger, but there’s something about listening out for inspiration and being ready to respond. When we’re stuck with a piece of work, doing something completely different like going for a walk or listening to a piece of music can be just what we need to unlock our inspiration. Perhaps now is a good time to look around you – really look, with an open mind as well as open eyes – and find something to inspire you to write a poem of your own.

3) Poems connect us

When I was little, I remember feeling that this poem connected me to what seemed an impossibly ancient world, of songs and dreams, and I have since always looked at poems as a way to connect me to someone else’s experience. Now more than ever, we need these connections to help us understand each other, and to keep our bonds strong while we’re apart.

It probably won’t surprise you to know that I went on to write my own poems (just for me) throughout my childhood, as a way to tell stories and create glimpses into different worlds. I also studied Old English at university, and eventually wrote my doctoral thesis about this wonderful, confounding, intricate language. I now work as the CEO of the English Association, a learned society for English, and a charity which works to further the knowledge, enjoyment, and understanding of the English language and its literatures. It is a privilege to share the joy of high-quality children’s books through English 4-11 Picture Book Awards, a competition which recognises the best children’s picture books as recommended by teachers and education experts.

Becky Fisher

Becky Fisher is CEO of the English Association.

 

Photo of Caedmon’s Cross by Rich Tea, by Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license 2.0

CLiPPA Poetry Award

Louise Johns-Shepherd: CLiPPA 2020

It was only about 10 days ago, when I said I would write this blog about CLiPPA in the time of lockdown.  My plan was to write about how we were defying the odds, taking to the internet and soldiering on with the only award solely for published children’s poetry in the UK.

How fast things change in this slowly moving time.

We have just announced that we are postponing the CLiPPA shortlist announcement for the time being and we don’t know what the time scale will be for the 2020 Award.

The reasons for this are manifold and like everything at the moment, complex.  The CLiPPA is always a brilliant interplay and partnership between poetry, poets, illustrators, performance, audiences, teaching and learning.  This horrible virus and the situation it has created has touched every part of our plans.

We’ve spent the last six years working to put children at the heart of this award.  The involvement of our schools in the shadowing scheme is a unique and important part of using the shortlist to build a poetry community.  With schools functioning very, very differently at the moment and teachers working round the clock to accommodate this, we don’t think that the shadowing would have the best chance of success.  And we can’t produce the resources that normally support the shadowing scheme right now.  We are a fiercely independent charity and around 85% of our income comes from revenue that we earn.  At the moment it isn’t possible for us to do that.  Our Centre and our beautiful Literacy Library are closed and more than half our staff are furloughed.  We can’t make videos, we can’t get to the books and we are concentrating the efforts of our remaining staff on supporting teachers who are teaching key workers’ children and on providing support for home learning.

The CLiPPA is always a team effort.  A key part of that team is the wonderful, selfless support we get from the National Theatre.  They have also had to close, they don’t know when they will open and they can’t possibly know what their schedule will be when they return.  We need to give them the time and space to work this out.

Our brilliant chair of judges for the 2020 award is Michael Rosen.  I’m sure you’re aware that Michael is currently ill with suspected coronavirus.  Our other judges have been meeting virtually and working hard but we want Michael’s focus to be on getting himself well.  We know that everyone will agree with this and will respect our decision to wait before proceeding with this year’s arrangements.

The reason CLiPPA exists is to promote children’s poetry.  Yes, there are wonderful winners but the shortlist is equally important.  We want to promote, to celebrate and to acknowledge the brilliance of all the books on the shortlist and to give them all the prominence and the publicity they deserve.  We just don’t think that will happen right now.

All of which is really rather depressing.  Yet there are also wonderful things happening that have made our hearts sing.  Our fabulous supporters and sponsors ALCS and Arts Council England have been amazing and nothing but helpful and supportive in every way.  Our brilliant partners like National Poetry Day, Poetry Archive and Poetry by Heart have been so lovely they’ve brought tears to our eyes and the generosity of spirit from everyone we’ve had to tell has been wonderful.

And poetry is important right now.  And children’s poetry is SO important right now.  We’ve seen fabulous online initiatives from children’s poets like Laura Mucha, Matt Goodfellow, Joanne Limburg, Brian Moses, Roger Stevens, Irish Laureate Sarah Crossan and many more, bringing poetry writing, reading and listening into the homes of children.  We’ve seen the #PoemADay take off and visits to the CLPE Poetryline site have doubled in the last fortnight with thousands of children, teachers and parents watching previous CLiPPA shortlisters read their poems and talk about their writing.

So whilst this isn’t the blog I set out to write when I first took it on, it is hopeful.  CLiPPA 2020 will happen.  Like many things right now, it might be late and it might not be quite what we planned, but it will happen and it will involve thousands of children and hundreds of schools. In the meantime we know that the wonderful children’s poetry community is still there and still working to bring the power of poetry to millions of young people because poetry heals, poetry helps and poetry matters.

Louise Johns-Shepherd

Before joining CLPE in 2013, Louise was the headteacher of two schools, a nursery school and a primary school and was also a senior leader in both the Primary National Strategies and the National College of School Leadership. Louise is the governor of a primary school and is a judge for a range of book awards including the Cheltenham Festival Reading Teachers, Reading Pupils, Amnesty CILIP Honour Medal and the 2019 Brandford Boase. She writes articles and blogs for a range of publications. She tweets at @loujs.

National Poetry Day

Mónica Parle, Word Play: A Case for the National Poetry Day Trade Campaign

As a Mexican-American teen growing up in suburban Texas, the poems I read in school—all wildflowers in wooded forests and elegies to centuries’ gone battles—bore no resemblance to the Chihuahuan desert where I was born, the Mexican border town where my abuelos lived, or the curlicue highways of my hometown. And they certainly made no mention of what it was like to live a life eternally in translation.

If you had asked me then, I would have said I had no time for poetry. But if you had asked me if I loved language, even surly teenage me would have told you yes, without hesitation.

This was largely due to my mother, who spent summer afternoons teaching me Spanish. Our workbooks were filled with activities my mother wrote and illustrated with pictures cut from magazines and pasted onto construction paper. This was only the first shift for Mom, who spent her evenings teaching night classes at the community college.

Her main route of engagement was rhymes and word play. Even now, when I get rattled, one runs through my head: “erre con erre cigarro, erre con erre barril, rápido corren los carros en el ferrocarril.” Not only did it teach me to roll my rs, but it still serves as a calming charm for me. (The phrase is a nonsense tongue-twister, literally meaning: “rr with rr cigar, rr with rr barrel, the cars go fast on the rail line.” I always liked the way it clattered across my tongue like a railroad car.)

I will admit that my siblings and I only learned Spanish to decipher my bilingual parents’ private conversations, but Mom gave us a gift I only now fully appreciate: Spanish was a gateway. In Latin American literature seminars at university, I discovered Cesar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, who provided a bridge to Whitman and others writing in English. From there I discovered the ways experience can overlap, even if cultural context differs.

I’m thinking of Mom’s lessons today, as I type at my kitchen table. My kids are in fits of giggles in the adjoining living room, “Mummy kicking” to Joe Wicks’s PE lesson on YouTube. I’ve tried to channel my mother’s playful spirit, as I struggle to learn the new methods of teaching math or to identify the best of the thousand teaching links I’ve been sent by their schools during the corona-crisis.

I’m far more privileged than my mom. There’s a wealth of materials available online, but I also recognize the value of her subject expertise: there’s so much to wade through and it’s hard to know what’s best.

This makes me reflect again on what teachers face, especially when it comes to a generation of teachers (and parents like me), who might bear a certain hesitation toward poetry.

This is why I fervently believe in National Poetry Day’s Trade Campaign. It aims to highlight the diverse forms and ranges of poetry books published in the UK. Through our lists of recommended books for teens and children, we make it easier for teachers and parents—and students themselves—to read inspiring new work. We get a wider range of voices into schools and libraries.

We have recommendations for reading groups, too, and a general Best New Poetry list, which last year featured books by two of my favourite poets: Jericho Brown’s The Tradition and Ada Limón’s The Carrying.

How can you help? (I’m sure, you ask!) The 2020 lists will be published soon on the NPD website, and it would be a great help if you could share them widely through your networks.

If you’re a publisher, please consider submitting titles for next year. The NPD team spends a considerable amount of time chasing titles down, and we’d love to see an even wider range of poets represented.

And it’s still not too late to help curate for 1st October 2020: we also feature poems on the theme of Vision on the National Poetry Day website. If you have any recommendations for out-of-copyright or permission-cleared poems on that theme, please e-mail them to me.

Mónica Parle

 

Mónica Parle is National Poetry Day Manager for The Forward Arts Foundation.

Children's Poet and Educator

Brian Moses: Fire Lit Eyes – Running a School Writing Club

Fire Lit Eyes: Running a school writing club

For four years from 1978 – 1982, Pie Corbett and I were teaching in the same primary school, having previously become friends at teachers’ training college. It was a school that served a large estate of houses on the edge of a town that the railway had abandoned under Beeching. There had been very little thought about what those people who lived on the estate actually needed – no shops, no pub, no community centre. Parents brought their problems into school, argued in the playground or sought counselling from the headteacher.

The children brought their own troubles into the classroom and needed sympathetic but firm management. We discovered that many of the children really enjoyed being creative with words. They had imaginations and grasped enthusiastically at the ideas we presented them with. Our own inspiration came from the work of Sandy Brownjohn, from Ted Hughes manual ‘Poetry in the Making’ and from the American poet and educationalist, Kenneth Koch who had produced a number of books featuring the poetry of city kids. We were also impressed with the work of teacher Chris Searle and his publications – ‘Stepney Words’ and ‘Firewords’ which highlighted writing by children in London schools.

I forget whose idea it was but we decided to invite anyone who enjoyed writing to return to school on a Wednesday evening for extra poetry writing sessions with us. We were allowed to run these in the pre-school playgroup hut where we perched on tiny chairs or sat on the floor and wrote from 7.30 till 9 p.m. For our first session 30 children arrived out of the darkness of the estate. Few were brought by their parents, most just walked to school as they would in the daytime.

Pie and I were able to try out ideas that we might have thought twice about using in the classroom. We were surrealists taking our writing beyond the real with no limits to anyone’s imagination. Often we explored three or four ideas each session and children would arrive the next day eager to show us poems that they had completed at home. We wrote with the children too and shared our ideas. They knew that they could comment and make criticisms about what we had written in the same way that we did with their writing. There was no fear of work being marked or graded and the poems were celebrated for what they were. On summer evenings we wrote on location visiting a graveyard, the abandoned railway line, a turkey farm and a spooky house.

We saved many of the poems that were written and put them in a book that we wrote about teaching poetry. We sent it to Oxford University Press as we liked the anthologies that John Foster had done for them. After three months, an editor from OUP range me up and said they wanted to publish it. That was ‘Catapults and Kingfishers’. We were just in the right place at the right time and they’d happened to be looking for a book like ours. It was, they told us, the first unsolicited manuscript they’d published in fifteen years! And that book launched our careers.

Since those days the school has consistently lounged at the bottom of the league table in its LEA and has been in and out of special measures constantly… but we believed our children were as good as any others. We also had some winners in the WH Smith competition out of some 30,000 entries. ITV also made videos of two of the winning poems.

Recently Kate Long got in touch with me about a writing club that she runs at her school. You can find out more about her work here.

The Able Writers Scheme that I started up in 2002 operates on similar lines. We bring children together from different schools for a day of writing for writing’s sake. The scheme has been successfully run by the Authors Abroad agency for the past eight years and we have over 150 host schools from Aberdeen to the Isle of Wight who organise such days. Information about the scheme and how your school might become a host school can be found here.

The business man Alan Sugar is always complaining that the candidates on ‘The Apprentice’ often lack imagination and creativity. If those qualities are not fostered in schools, then we shouldn’t be surprised at what he says.

Brian Moses

Brian Moses has been a professional children’s poet since 1988. To date he has over 220 books published including volumes of his own poetry such as Lost Magic and I Thought I Heard a Tree Sneeze, anthologies such as The Secret Lives of Teachers and the recently published Spaced Out, (edited with James Carter), plus picture books such as Walking With My Iguana and Dreamer.

Over 1 million copies of Brian’s poetry books have now been sold.

Brian also visits schools to run writing workshops and perform his own poetry and percussion shows. To date he has visited well over 3000 schools and libraries throughout the UK and abroad.

Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award

Alice Watson: Combat the World with Poetry

Combat the World with Poetry

The world can really feel like a strange place at times, even more so with the recent Covid-19 pandemic, and whilst many people are clearing supermarket shelves of hand sanitizers and buying more toilet rolls that an Andrex puppy can jump into, I think it is important that we continue to seek nourishment through writing and reading poetry in confusing times.

As the Education Officer for The Poetry Society I am lucky that I am always immersed in poetry and constantly blown away by poetry written by young people across the Education programmes we deliver at The Poetry Society. One of the most prestigious programmes that I manage is the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, the biggest and one of the most significant poetry competitions in the world. This year’s Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award was launched on 5 March to coincide with World Book Day and I couldn’t be more excited that this year’s judges include the inspiring Maura Dooley and amazing Keith Jarrett. For more information about the competition please visit foyleyoungpoets.org.

The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award encourages young people to be bold, brave, creative, to express themselves through poetry and to share their understanding of themselves and how they navigate the world. I am always struck by how talented, compassionate and concerned so many young people are, and how they express this in their poetry which does not shy away from global issues including racism, gender politics and climate change.

I think it’s important that when a young person enters a poem (or 20 poems) into the competition, that they feel a huge sense of accomplishment. They have taken the time to express themselves and to create their own piece of art, and it really is a pleasure for the judges and me to read their work. Every young person who enters the competition this year will receive a certificate to congratulate them on their achievement, and I hope that each entrant displays their certificate with pride and continues to express themselves through poetry.

In the February half term, I had the great honour of spending a couple of days with the top 15 winners of the 2019 Foyle Young Poets competition on their Arvon writing retreat at The Hurst in Shropshire. Here, the top 15 winners from across the U.K. and overseas spent 5 days fully immersed in writing, reading and performing poetry, as well as cooking, exploring the Shropshire countryside and making new friendships. At The Hurst, all of the winners were given time to explore new skills and experiment with poetic forms and work with world class poet-tutors including Mimi Khalvati, Raymond Antrobus and guest tutor Anthony Anaxagorou.

Arvon Residential at The Hurst for 2019 Foyle winners, poet tutors and in locos. Photo credit Dan Haworth for The Poetry Society.

The haven of space and time to explore poetry either as a writer, reader or hopefully both is a necessary liberation in a world that many of us can’t quite fathom. Even Storm Dennis had a good go at trying to halt the winners’ writing retreat, but thankfully the poet gods worked in our favour and everyone arrived without trouble.

As someone who does not regularly write, I increasingly experience the benefit of self-expression through poetry, not just as a reader but also as a writer and I hope more people are encouraged to be as brave, bold and creative as the entrants to the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award. Poetry (as I have learnt) can be a fulfilling sanctuary of creative expression to combat the panic of supermarket sweep.

Alice Watson

Alice Watson is the Education Officer at The Poetry Society. She manages the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award and supports the delivery of SLAMbassadors, Look North More Often and Artsmark at The Poetry Society. She has previously worked at Lauderdale House and Shakespeare’s Globe and studied an MA at King’s College, University of London in Education in Arts and Cultural Settings. To get in touch please contact Alice Watson.

Director of the Betjeman Poetry Prize

Imogen Lycett-Green: The Poem Inside

The Poem Inside

 

Going to the Dentist

Starting to tap on my teeth

With a silver metal spoon

Look at each of my teeth

Like a teacher looking at her class

I can’t move, sitting perfectly still

While he stands there

Holding a tiny little drill.

 

Maryan, Argyle school, 5Q

 

This poem was written for Track Record, a community project in Camden, supported by HighSpeed1. Maryan was one of 120 Y5 pupils who participated in six class workshops over six months, delivered by the truly inspiring poet for kids, Paul Lyalls. In July last year, at the project’s closing ceremony, Maryan (10) stood up and read her poem out on a stage at St Pancras International station. In front of friends and strangers – including passers-by who paused to listen under the sky blue railway shed, sitting on suitcases – Maryan’s tiny voice told a story. Maryan had never read a poem out loud before, let alone written one. English is not her first language, yet she finds herself in the UK education system, at a school where over 30 languages are spoken, trying to communicate in a foreign tongue. Through the simple act of writing a poem, she finds her voice.

 

My Cousin’s First Steps

A very wobbly first step.

Like a loose tooth in a happy smile.

Everyone in the room watches with excitement.

Staring at this small foot.

He walks, he falls over.

 

Nasif, Richard Cobden School, 5L

 

Nasif has a little cousin. ‘Everyone in the room’ does not necessarily speak English. Yet here is Nasif, aged ten, painting pictures in our hearts of his toddler cousin taking precarious first steps in front of an audience. Nasif’s classmates cheered as he stood up to read. They waited, while he too, like the toddler, faltered. But Nasif did not fall over. His poem flew to the rafters to a volley of whoops and cheers. Toot toot went the train, ready to leave the station. Toot toot!

Track Record is in its second year now. The fantastic Paul Lyalls is at it again. This time he has signed up a third school. Track Record is a simple project; we don’t even have a website – though we are thinking about that. We publish a booklet of their poems for the kids to take home, and over 30 poems are printed onto boards at St Pancras, to the delight of the thousands of commuters and tourists who pass through the station daily. The poems stay up all summer. The dream is to expand the project, school by school, year by year.

How many times have you rummaged through that old box in the attic to find a scrap of a picture of a house you drew when you were eight? A story you wrote about dinosaurs when you were nine? Perhaps, like Nasif and Maryan, you wrote a poem when you were ten. Think about what that means to you now.

Connecting with the imagination, seeing life with fresh perspective, celebrating the everyday – these are life skills which lead not only to improved literacy, but an invaluable  sense of oneself in the world which can last a lifetime. It’s pure magic, not rocket science (though, according to some of the young poets on the project, who wrote about racing to the moon, it can be that too!) As adults working in the children’s poetry sector, all we have to do is open the door. We can do that on small budgets, with scant resources. We only need to use our own imaginations to think of new ways of ensuring every child finds their poem inside.

Imogen Lycett-Green

Imogen Lycett Green is an independent arts producer, working on community projects across the poetry sector. Formerly director of the Betjeman Poetry Prize, Imogen judges the Chiddingstone Castle Literary Festival Short Story Prize for children. She is co-founder of the Narrative Medicine programme at the Brighton Health & Wellbeing centre where she runs poetry workshops for doctors as well as adults with chronic illness.

Author and Anthologist

Ana Sampson: Introducing Poetry to Primary School Children

Introducing Poetry to Primary School Children

By the time we leave school, some of us have been rather put off poetry. Actually – confession time, now – I was. Picking it apart and poring over the meanings throughout my education had sucked some of the simple joy out of poetry. I became paralysed by the thought that I must understand every element, rather than just enjoying it – I had to learn to love poetry again.

Primary school children, however, don’t have any of those associations. The earliest things we hear and learn are usually songs and nursery rhymes: from the sun putting his hat on to the little piggies of our toes. We often read rhyming books with our children: my five year old is word perfect on everything from There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly to Room on the Broom, and woe betide me if I try to skip a verse to get to bedtime quicker! Children are at home in rhyme and verse before they learn to talk, so they don’t have any of the associations some adults have of poetry being intimidating, or difficult.

So, my advice on sharing poetry with young children is just to get started! I love Lewis Carroll’s inventive and whimsical poems. Even though today’s children won’t be familiar with the Victorian rhymes many of them parody (though they might enjoy Mary Howitt’s ‘The Spider and the Fly’, which is one of them) the nonsense and fun of ‘The Lobster Quadrille’ or ‘You Are Old, Father William’ will tickle them. Edward Lear’s poems are wonderful too. Ask them to draw a Jaberwocky, the Jumblies in their sea-faring sieve or the Pobble who has no toes, and watch their imaginations soar. There are lots of great modern collections of poetry aimed at children that continue this imaginative tradition.

Reading poems aloud, in as dramatic and over the top a way as possible, is a brilliant way to bring them to life to children. My daughter loves A A Milne’s ‘Disobedience’ with its rapid, building rhythm and repetition of ‘James James Morrison Morrison William George Dupree’. If you feel they’ll respond well to a touch of goriness, Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children will appeal – try Jim, who was eaten by a lion.

Researching She Is Fierce I came across some wonderful, lesser known poems by women that even young children will – I hope – enjoy as much as I did. Liz Lochhead’s ‘A Glasgow Nonsense Rhyme for Molly’, and Katherine Mansfield’s playful ‘When I Was A Bird’ are bound to delight younger readers. For slightly older children, the chatty, encouraging tone of ‘God Says Yes to Me’ by Kaylin Haught will appeal. Jan Dean’s ‘Three Good Things’ could inspire a discussion about the three best things to choose from their day. Jean Little’s ‘Today’ – like the poems in Allan Ahlberg’s much-loved Please Mrs Butler – speaks directly to the experience of school-children, and they will be delighted to find themselves reflected there – and with the poem’s rebelliousness!

You’re never too young for poetry and I’d love to hear what poems young readers (and listeners) enjoy! You can tweet me and let me know their favourites at @Anabooks.

Ana Sampson

Ana Sampson is the author of many bestselling anthologies including I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud and Other Poems You Half-Remember from School, Tyger Tyger Burning Bright: Much Loved Poems you Half-Remember, Poems to Learn by Heart, Green and Pleasant Land: Best-Loved Poems of the British Countryside and Best-Loved Poems: A Treasury of Verse. Ana grew up in Kent and studied English Literature at the University of Sheffield. After achieving both a BA and an MA, she began a career in publishing PR and has appeared multiple times on radio and television discussing books and poetry. Ana lives in Surrey with her husband, two daughters and two demanding cats. She is Fierce was her first poetry collection for Macmillan.

Children's Librarian

Lorraine Mariner: Poems Go Green! at the National Poetry Library

Poems Go Green! at the National Poetry Library

As I write this the Southbank Centre’s Imagine Children’s Festival is in full flow and the Royal Festival Hall is bursting at the seams with children and their grown-ups. The Imagine Festival takes place annually during February half-term and for the last five years we have been holding a Day of Poetry in the National Poetry Library for ages 0-11. We like to think of it as a Poetry Festival within the bigger festival.

This year our day of poetry was devoted to eco poetry. The idea for the day was sparked by Poems from a Green and Blue Planet edited by Sabrina Mahfouz, a wide-ranging and majestic nature anthology published last autumn. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a whole day of eco poetry at this time of climate emergency, when so many children, inspired by Greta Thunberg, are taking a stand?

Our day of poetry began at 10.30am with Rug Rhymes for under-5s and Ed Boxall joined us for this Eco Edition. He shared a picture book he has recently illustrated, Dragons’ Wood (Troika, 2019), of a poem by Brian Moses. We all took a walk through the wood with our dog catching glimpses of dragons. At 11.30am we had a workshop run by the UK’s Green Poet Martin Kiszko. Martin has worked with Sir David Attenborough composing music for nature documentaries such as BBC’s ‘Wildlife on One’ and has published two collections of green poetry for children illustrated by Nick Park (of Oscar winning Wallace and Gromit fame). Our workshop was aimed at ages 6-10 and Martin got the children writing in different forms; an animal kenning and a clerihew about an environmental issue.

Ed and Martin were back with us for our 1.30pm reading, aimed at ages 5-7, along with poet Carole Bromley, for Poems Go Green! Ed had realised that sticks feature quite a lot in his poems and his gentle, contemplative poems got us looking closely at nature. Carole took us to Australia, a country she recently visited, and which the children were aware had been tackling catastrophic bushfires. One of her poems reminded us to care for the less loveable animals and insects along with the cute koalas. Martin finished this set with his exuberant, rhyming word play, celebrating, amongst other environmentally friendly energy options, poo power.

Our final event of the day was a 3pm reading for ages 8-11, Poems from a Green and Blue Planet, where poet and editor Sabrina Mahfouz shared poems from the anthology along with contributing poet Liz Brownlee. The UK had just been battered on two consecutive weekends by Storm Ciara and Storm Dennis, so the reading began with a selection of stormy poems. Sabrina also got the children thinking of words to describe a storm and we combined these with objects. I think my favourite was “clattering candle”. Highlights of some of the classic and newly commissioned poems that Sabrina and Liz shared were Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Peace and Pancakes’, Hollie McNish’s ‘Anything!’ and Imtiaz Dharker’s ‘How to Cut a Pomegranate’ (with pomegranate prop!).

At 4pm it was over. It was a hectic day but all of our events sold out, poets sold and signed books, and I left work feeling less eco-anxious and hope the children that attended felt the same. We’d asked the poets for green tips and Martin advised that you should love the planet in the same way as you would your parents, brothers and sisters or pets. Nature poetry is a great way to foster this love and we have some wonderful collections and anthologies in the National Poetry Library that we recommend – please click here to see our list on the National Poetry Library Catalogue.

Lorraine Mariner

Lorraine Mariner is an Assistant Librarian at the National Poetry Library and has published two poetry collections for adults with Picador, Furniture (2009) and There Will Be No More Nonsense (2014).

Children's Poet and Illustrator

Sue Hardy Dawson: Why Poetry Matters

Why Poetry Matters

I was born into a house full of poetry. Nightly my father lulled me to sleep with the many poems he knew by heart. On long journeys or stuck in traffic-jams we played rhyming games or changed the lyrics to songs and nursery rhymes. Mum too wrote funny verses for family birthday cards. So from an early age I experienced everything from AA Milne to WH Auden. I grew to love each softly spoken syllable; the portent in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the drumming beat of The Charge of the Light Brigade, the gentle rhythms of Night Mail and wistful repetition in Hiawatha. Each night, anew, I marvelled at Tygers and green eyed yellow idols, lamented on Bessy the landlord’s daughter awaiting her highwayman or lost myself in exotic cargoes of stately Spanish galleons. I took them for my own begging for my favourites. Naturally enough, whilst young, I didn’t fully understand them. Nevertheless, I learned to love lyrical words to love their musicality and my father was a very enthusiastic performer.

Eventually, perhaps inevitably, I began to write myself. Like most beginners, I made mistakes, using words that were archaic or didn’t quite fit. However, the more poets I read the more I got a sense of what worked and didn’t. I fell in love with Hughes at secondary school. I went on to read any and every poet I could lay my hands on, I still do. Then I liked poems for many reasons, they weren’t hard to read because they were usually smaller with more white space, yet there was often a lot to understand. Despite my dyslexia I could learn them well enough to risk reading them out. Writing poems too required less stamina and even if I had to rewrite them many times, they were only short and I could keep them inside my head and work on them. Poetry gave me something I could succeed at.

Whilst I’m not suggesting everyone who enjoys poetry will or should become a poet I believe I was very privileged to experienced poetry as few do in an unpressurised joyful way. I remain convinced that even in this multimedia world or in a busy school with all the demands of curriculum, making time for purely enjoying poetry really matters. Well any poet would I suppose. However, apart from being great fun, something that should never be underestimated as a learning tool, there are many positive effects from poetry for all children.

Like music poetry is multisensory, research suggests it lights up our brains in a similar way, triggering emotions, developing brain cells and improving memory. Historically our ancestors exploited this quality to record stories as ballads handing them down for generations long before the general populace could read or write.

Equally this memorizing characteristic helps children to learn new words in context whilst rhythm and rhyme help with pronunciation and stresses.

Similarly, rhyming, assonance and alliteration promote literacy, building phonic awareness and grouping phonic patterns.

Learning and acting out poetry also develops physical and verbal coordination laying the ground for all manner of public speaking or performance skills.

Perhaps, equally important though, I feel, an early pleasure in poetry for its own sake is more likely to lead to a lifelong love. For even those who claim to dislike it often turn to it in times of need; to express and explore otherwise inexpressible emotions. Finally though poetry is not alone in allowing us to walk in another’s shoes it is more open in making spaces for our own experiences and uniqueness in each footprint.

Sue Hardy-Dawson (Sue’s new collection, If I were Other than Myself, Troika Books is out soon.)

Sue Hardy-Dawson a poet & illustrator. Her debut collection, Where Zebras Go, Otter-Barry Books was shortlisted for the 2018 CLiPPA. Her second, Apes to Zebras, Bloomsbury, co-written with poetry ambassadors Roger Stevens and Liz Brownlee, won the NSTB Awards. Sue loves visiting schools, has worked with the Prince of Wales Foundation, ‘Children and the Arts’. As a dyslexic poet, she loves encouraging reluctant writers.