Children’s Poets – Children's Poetry Summit

Charles Causley and Endings

Like many others, I have spent some of my time during lockdown working through the tottering pile of books I’ve always meant to read. And so, long overdue, I fell head over heels in love with the rollicking and poignant Collected Poems for Children of Charles Causley.

I have a gorgeous, sunset-coloured edition, published by Macmillan and zestily illustrated by John Lawrence. The poems are effortlessly rhymed, mischievous, absurd, thoughtful, intelligent, wondering, steeped in folk traditions, and gently, constructively anarchic. You can find a few examples and a biography on the Children’s Poetry Archive and in this lovely blog post on Anthony Wilson’s Lifesaving Poems.

What I’d like to enthuse about specifically here is Causley’s endings. I think he’s so good at them, and they showcase the many ways you can leave a poem reverberating in the reader’s mind. Causley is famous for his use of form – particularly the ballad – and all his poems are strongly metred and rhymed. The lines march, skip and dance, but they never arrive with a thump at a closed-off destination. Instead, they use form to leave the poem hanging, tantalisingly.

Take the fresh and shivery ghost story ‘Miller’s End’. The poem ends with a revelation, simply rhymed, but the poem is far from tidily tied up. Who is the shadowy Miss Wickerby? Or how about the famous ‘Timothy Winters’ – the poem ends with that most final of words, “Amen”, but the reason that Timothy Winters and the speaker are praying is because Timothy’s future is so uncertain. It’s painfully empathetic:

So come one angel, come on ten:

Timothy Winters says ‘Amen

Amen amen amen amen.’

Timothy Winters, Lord.

Amen

Like Edward Lear, Causley knows the impact of a repeated line and particularly a repeated name. In Lear’s limericks, the last line reworks the first: “There was an old person of Putney” becomes “That romantic old person of Putney”. The effect with both Causley and Lear is the same: the poems explicitly refuse to shut down meaning or interpretation. You’re back where you started, just with a little more context. In ‘Tell, Tell the Bees’, the first and last stanza are identical:

Tell, tell the bees,

The bees in the hive,

That Jenny Green is gone away,

Or nothing will thrive.

Who is Jenny and what has happened to her? Who is the new “master / Or mistress”? Does anyone tell the bees? The poem leaves us wondering, but sure of the mission’s importance. The repetition and names also reinforce the folk, song-like nature of the poems.

Many of Causley’s poems are narrative and finish in a highly satisfactory way – check out ‘I Saw a Jolly Hunter’ for a gleeful example:

Bang went the jolly gun.

Hunter jolly dead.

Jolly hare got clean away.

Jolly good, I said.

But just as often, he delights in ambiguity, as at the end of the eerie, earthy ‘Spell’:

When I was walking by Tamar spring

I found me a stone, and a plain gold ring.

I stared at the sun, I stared at my shoes.

(Which do you choose? Which do you choose?)

Often when I go into schools, I find that children drawn to writing in form are also drawn to very conclusive endings. Such endings have their place, but it’s freeing to experience how a formal poem can leave a question in the air, too. Most contemporary poems leave themselves open rather than closed, and so Causley’s poems blithely bridge a number of traditions, in the most delightful way. I would recommend him to anyone.

Rachel Piercey

Rachel Piercey is a freelance poet, editor and tutor. She has co-edited three children’s poetry anthologies with the Emma Press and regularly performs her work and runs poetry workshops in primary schools. Rachel’s poems for adults have been published in various journals including The Poetry Review, The Rialto and Magma, as well as two pamphlets with the Emma Press and one with HappenStance. She lives in London. www.rachelpierceypoet.com

I have a sense that the world of children’s poetry is having something of a revival at the moment. Someone with their nose closer to the details would be able to aggregate what’s going on but as someone who is himself immersed in it all, I can see that there seem to be more single collections coming out, along with more anthologies bringing together the work of several or many poets. On top of that, I see a lot of activity on social media – twitter especially – drawing attention to events, school visits and prizes. I personally know several of the young poets working with schools and bringing out new books themselves and it’s great to see that they’re making a living. The CLPE’s prize for the best poetry book of the year draws a good deal of attention to what’s coming out too.

I can’t immediately put my hand on what is the cause (or causes) for this but I would point at the ‘advocates’ of poetry for children who put in a shift on this: CLPE, the English and Media Centre, Chris and the folks here on this website, the Poetry Archive, the magazines like Carousel, Books for Keeps, English Association 4-11 and Teaching English from NATE. We can also see that several publishers are going the extra mile and working on bringing out beautifully produced books of poetry for children and young people. Another growth point is the increase in the number and variety of rhyming picture books. These provide a base in how parents, teachers and children think about poetry: that it’s accessible and engaging. It’s easy to forget that ‘The Gruffalo’ and the rest of Julia Donaldson’s hugely popular books are of course poems. Alongside this, at the other end of childhood, we’re seeing the rise of the free verse novel (Sharon Creech, Sarah Crossan) which contributes to a wider acceptance of what I might call the ‘poetry way of seeing things’. I think also that poets themselves have got more media savvy and are using the internet more with news, videos, websites and the rest. My son and I have worked very hard on building up our web presence with regular updates on our YouTube Channel and my website. Obviously, putting poetry through these channels enables teachers, parents and children to access poetry very easily on tablets, laptops and phones.

I think there must also be a new enthusiasm amongst younger teachers who spend an inordinate amount of time locked into a curriculum obsessed with putting children through tests that only have right/wrong answers. Besides everything else that poetry offers, it provides quick benefits in terms of children’s confidence, interest, enthusiasm and what I call a ‘bridge’ to literacy. What I mean by that is the way in which poetry – particularly in performance – offers children a way in which they can easily make a bridge between the oral and the written. Purely in terms of literacy, poetry is a bonus when it comes to reading fluently.

In saying this, I don’t want to minimise in any way what poetry can offer by way of foregrounding emotions, feelings, a sense of self, a sense of culture, a sense of the plasticity and flexibility of language. More than that too: in its own way, poetry insists on being portable philosophy, carrying a commentary on the interactions between the mind, the world and events as they unfold. Speaking personally, poetry has above all enabled me to explore memory, whether that’s been through a form of ‘naturalism’ or through hyperbole. In all these matters, poetry will insist on not wanting to be reduced to those right/wrong answers but to make its effects known through suggestion, sensation, ambiguity and a movement of feeling across words, verses or a whole poem. And let’s not forget Keats and his ‘negative capability’ – those moments where, as writers or readers, we can sit in a place of not-fully-knowing. Whether teachers put the matter like this or not, I have a sense that for many, poetry has become a great place to do things that are not like the binary world demanded by the teach-and-test regime.

In general though, things are looking good!

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Tag: Children’s Poets

Rachel Piercey: Charles Causley and Endings

A Sense of a Revival, by Michael Rosen