Rachel Piercey – Children's Poetry Summit

Rachel Piercey: One Hundred Years of the Flower Fairies

2023 marks one hundred years since the publication of Flower Fairies of the Spring, the enchanted yet botanically accurate creations of artist and poet Cecily Mary Barker (1895-1973). As a young girl, I loved the Flower Fairies’ petal-dresses, their dreamy little faces, and their realistic gauzy wings. I loved the sense of scale conveyed by the outsized bunches of blooms and leaves they either held aloft or perched among. (The parts of each plant, I know now, were carefully drawn from life; if Barker could not find the flower she needed to study locally, she would visit Kew Gardens to make drawings there.) And I loved the clever poems that accompanied each fairy, memorably describing the appearance, habits and habitat of each flower.

Rereading the book now, I am still delighted by the unashamed magic of the illustrations. Barker never claimed to believe in fairies, but by her attention to detail and the perfect match of each fairy to each flower, she suggests a sort of poetic truth to their existence. And I am particularly struck by what I took for granted as a young reader: the lively skill of the poems. They take many different forms; Barker moves between two, three and four beat lines, between couplets, quatrains, six-line stanzas, and idiosyncratic patterns. The extracts below exhibit some of her variety – and how consistently flawless were her rhythm and rhyme. Her imagery is also consistently beautiful. In ‘The Song of the Crocus Fairies’, she breaks off from the four-beat pattern to sharpen our focus on this shining description:

Crocus white

Like a cup of light

In ‘The Song of the Windflower Fairy’ (noted as another name for Wood Anemone), the pleasure of encountering these star-like flowers – some of the first to bloom in spring, with their petals outstretched, like arms, towards the sun – is joyfully summoned:

The Winter’s long sleeping,

Like night-time, is done;

But day-stars are leaping

To welcome the sun.

Barker moves between first and third person, writing to capture the unique essence of each flower. The Dandelion Fairy is bold and mocking:

Sillies, what are you about

With your spades and hoes of iron?

You can never drive me out –

Me, the dauntless Dandelion!

The Daffodil Fairy’s voice is jubilant and playful, captured through skipping internal rhymes which also tell us some of the folk names of the flower:

…I, the Lent Lily, the Daffy-down-dilly…

While the small, humble Wood Sorrel Fairy relates to her child-reader:

Bracken stalks are shooting high,

Far and far above us;

We are little, you and I,

But the fairies love us.

As above, the flowers’ habitats are deftly described. The Windflower Fairy tells us that her petals “sprinkle / The wildwood with light”. (Today, the Woodland Trust notes, wood anemones are often a sign of ancient woodland, the old ‘wildwood’.) The Stitchwort Fairy tells us “I am brittle-stemmed and slender, / But the grass is my defender”. And in ‘The Song of the Lady’s-Smock Fairy’, we learn:

Where the grass is damp and green,

Where the shallow streams are flowing,

Where the cowslip buds are showing,

I am seen.

And always, the implicit or explicit message is that wildflowers are precious and miraculous. As the Speedwell Fairy pronounces, in a poem which intertwines sky, earth, human eyes and flower petals:

“See, here is a prize

Of wonderful worth:

A weed of the earth,

As blue as the skies!”

I would encourage any nature lover to revisit the Flower Fairies and sprinkle some petals of light over their day.

The Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool is holding an exhibition of Barker’s illustrations in spring 2023, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Flower Fairies of the Spring.

https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/whatson/lady-lever-art-gallery/exhibition/flower-fairies-tm

Rachel Piercey

Rachel Piercey is a poet and children’s writer. She is the editor of Tyger Tyger Magazine, an online journal of new poems for children, and regularly visits schools to perform and run workshops. Her search-and-find poetry-and-picture book, If You Go Down to the Woods Today (Magic Cat, 2021, illustrated by Freya Hartas), has been translated into twenty-seven languages.

www.rachelpierceypoet.com/

Children's Poet and Educator

Rachel Piercey: Tyger Tyger Issue 2 – Meet the Poems

I am delighted to introduce the second issue of Tyger Tyger Magazine, which launched on 16 May with twelve leaping, loping, kicking, crawling, slithering, splashing poems on the theme of Animals. We’re also calling for submissions for our next issue – see below for further details.

There is lots to learn in this Animals edition. ‘Tightrope Walk Team’ by S. J. Perillo is a mischievous list poem which revels in the unusual and exquisite names of different species. In his poem ‘Is a zebra like a horse?’, Will Birkin decisively answers the question of whether you can ride a zebra in a funny, rhyming investigation. And Sue Lancaster’s ‘Tail Tales’ invites us on a hugely enjoyable whistle-stop tour of different animals and how they use their tails, from squirrels to geckoes to kangaroos.

There are questions to ask, too. L. Kiew’s ‘Otter Questions’ wonders about the life of an otter, plunging us into her world using rich language and resonant kennings. And Annie Fisher challenges us to guess the slow, gooey creature whom gardeners fear, in her riddle poem ‘Who?’…

Cats are well represented in the selection. ‘The School Cats’ is a deeply imaginative and playful trio of poems by Catherine Olver, introducing us to three mysterious resident cats who have merged with their school environment. ‘Honey, best cat in the world’ by Michael Shann is a warmly lyrical and conversational poem about a beloved lost pet who helped and still helps the speaker through difficult emotions. And there’s a stray dog too, a noble and heroic character looking for a friend in Zaro Weil’s moving mini epic ‘Stray Dog in Havana’.

‘I Am Fionnula’ by Sophie Kirtley is a beautifully lyrical lament, a fresh take on the age-old theme of human-to-animal transformation, based on the Irish legend of The Children of Lir. Fionnula has been changed into a swan, but she still has her voice… Imaginative transformations also take place – suddenly and thrillingly – in Julie Stevens’s ‘Tickets to Ride’. The poem lets us in on a secret: that you can travel anywhere, to any animal habitat, if you use your imagination and creativity to find the ‘tickets’!

Mark Granier’s haunting poem ‘The ____saurus’ echoes with the roar of a mysterious, nameless dinosaur, still burning bright in our dreams. Meanwhile, at the other end of history, Jacqueline Shirtliff gives voice to a range of sea creatures urgently requesting that we sort out the issue of plastic in our oceans, in her rallying environmental poem ‘Too Many Bottles’.

Thank you to my fantastic editorial team, Rakhshan Rizwan, Helen Steffens and Kate Wakeling, and thank you to the poets for their wonderful poems. As before, all of them are available as free poem-posters, which you can download and print out. There are also free teaching resources to accompany ‘Tightrope Walk Team’, ‘Tickets to Ride’, and ‘Who?’, all aimed at children in Key Stage 2. There are ideas for exploring the poems and inspiring creative responses, and stylish templates to print out so that pupils can write up and display their finished poems.

Tyger Tyger Magazine is also currently open for submissions of new poems for children on the theme of The Colour Spectrum, until 30 June. This will be our autumn edition and we wanted to nod to the famous seasonal colours whilst keeping the theme open to every hue, and any approach. Send us poems of art, science, history and emotion – we can’t wait to read them!

Rachel Piercey

Rachel Piercey is a poet and tutor, and the editor of Tyger Tyger Magazine, an online journal of poems for children. She has co-edited three children’s poetry anthologies with the Emma Press, taught several courses on writing children’s poems for The Poetry School, and regularly performs and runs poetry workshops in primary schools. Rachel has written a poetry search-and-find book, If You Go Down the Woods Today (Magic Cat, 2021), and three pamphlets of poems for adults.

Children's Poetry Magazine

Rachel Piercey: Introducing Tyger Tyger Magazine, Issue 1: Beginnings

Introducing Tyger Tyger Magazine, Issue 1: Beginnings

In my last post for the blog, I announced the launch of Tyger Tyger Magazine, a new online journal of children’s poetry. The first issue has just launched, and I would like to introduce the twelve poems we ended up choosing, from a wonderful pool of submissions, along with short extracts and some of my thoughts on these lovely pieces.

The delightful ‘Assembly’, by Rob Walton, puts us in the shoes of a child who just can’t stop asking questions. They may come across as cheeky, but we can see that they are genuinely probing at language and meaning.

We have an Assembly about new beginnings.

I put my hand up and ask if it’s possible

to have old beginnings

‘In the beginning’, by Carole Bromley, perfectly captures that feeling when a small fib gets out of control. The resolution of the story is gleefully undermined by its last line, and we start wondering about truth and lies all over again…

[…] it was just a little fib

but it GREW.

Nobody checked the facts,

nobody knew.

‘Indian Cradle Song’ by Piu DasGupta reflects the circular, interconnected nature of Earth with its beautiful circular structure. It is a poem of mighty contrasts and song-like repetitions.

The earth’s crust begins in the ocean

The ocean begins in the moon-tides […]

‘Blueberries’ by Jérôme Luc Martin is a triolet with an empowering message for young readers. The repeated blue whales / blueberries image delights and surprises me every time I read it!

Start small, if you begin at all.

Blue whales begin as blueberries.

Hilary Elder’s ‘Catching a Yawn / Catching a Wave’ compares the experience of yawning, line by line, to a cresting wave. Together, the poems form a sort of living simile.

The wave caps,

Catching the bottom of the sky

And it holds on, on tippy-toes.

‘The Morning is Quiet’, by Robert Schechter, explores how quiet is just as complex and alive as noise: the lion may not be roaring, but it’s still there!

I think there’s a riot

of hush in my ear […]

‘New Baby’, by Paula Thompson, warmly captures a child’s thoughts about the arrival of a new sibling. As baby paraphernalia fills the house, doubts and anxieties fill the speaker’s mind.

I’ll have to share

their love; my stuff.

Andy Nuttall’s ‘The Platform Clock’ thrums with the excitement of train travel, conjuring a child’s sense of scale, potential and adventure. There’s a timeless, fairy-tale quality to the poem.

Up the line the track is singing;

Silver rails are faintly ringing.

Sarah Ziman’s speaker in ‘In-betweener’ is interested in the philosophy of beginnings – because it’s the summer holidays, and they’ve finished year six, but not yet started year seven…

Well, here is a puzzle I can’t seem to fix

Am I in year seven? Or still a year six?

In Amlanjyoti Goswami’s ‘Seeing it new’, the speaker also stands poised between the old year and the new, feeling suddenly nervous. The poem explores different understandings of a ‘new’ year and ends with a line of exquisite beauty.

But that door is knocking. I hear a bell.

Wait, I shout, not time yet […]

‘On Your Marks…’ by Jay Brazeau is a poem of joyful exuberance and highly satisfying repetition, firing the starting pistol for everything from bakers to bedbugs. Definitely one for performance!

runner, runner

ready, set, go!

baker, baker

ready, set, dough!

The final poem, ‘Night’s Begun’ by Lisa Varchol Perron, soothes us with beautiful imagery and an abundance of ‘s’ and ‘l’ sounds, leaving us on the threshold of a gentle new adventure in dreamland.

Stillness settles, soft and deep.

Quiet lulls and leads to sleep […]

I am so happy with this beginning for Tyger Tyger Magazine. Thank you to my fantastic editorial team: Rakhshan Rizwan, Helen Steffens and Kate Wakeling. Each poem features on a free, downloadable poem poster and there are teaching resources to accompany ‘On Your Marks’, ‘Blueberries’ and ‘Catching a Wave / Yawn’. Happy New Year and happy reading!

Rachel Piercey

Rachel Piercey is a poet and tutor, and the editor of Tyger Tyger Magazine, an online journal of poems for children. She has co-edited three children’s poetry anthologies with the Emma Press, taught courses on writing children’s poems for The Poetry School, and regularly performs and runs poetry workshops in primary schools. Rachel has written a poetry search-and-find book, If You Go Down the Woods Today (Magic Cat, 2021), and three pamphlets of poems for adults. https://tygertyger.net/

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 Poet

Rachel Piercey: Tyger Tyger

Introducing Tyger Tyger Magazine

I am thrilled to introduce Tyger Tyger Magazine, a new online journal of poems for children which will soon be accepting submissions for the first issue. Establishing a magazine of children’s poetry is something I’ve been dreaming of for a long time – and now I’ve finally taken the leap.

Once a term, Tyger Tyger Magazine will publish twelve poems on a shared theme, by contemporary writers from across the world. Selected poems in each issue will come with free teaching resources, and each poem will be available as a free, downloadable, printable poster. I love how the walls of primary school classrooms are always bright and bustling with creativity, and this will make it easy to add a poem or two into the mix. I want these poems to roar in as many dimensions as possible!

I really hope this will be welcome news for writers of children’s poetry. Poets who write for adults have a vast number of submission opportunities, and I know myself how helpful it is to have a focus for new writing, and how exciting it is to see your work appear in conversation with other new poems. It’s also exhilaratingly easy, as a reader of poetry, to find magazines full of brand-new poems to be stirred, entertained and astonished by. But if you write poems for children, there are far fewer opportunities. And I believe it’s equally important for children’s poets to have a direction, testing ground and showcase for new work. Jonathan Humble has recently launched a children’s poetry magazine too – the gorgeous Dirigible Balloon, already sailing with lots of lovely poems – so there are at least two new places to submit this year. I hope more and more children’s poetry magazines will open up in time!

The name Tyger Tyger comes, of course, from the poem by William Blake. As soon as it occurred to me, I knew I’d found my title. The real-life creature stalks inside it: wild and mighty, precious and playful. For those who know Blake’s poem, it conjures awe-filled questions about existence. The archaic spelling gifts a twist of strangeness. And there’s the sense of an echo or an invocation in the repetition, which is one of my favourite poetic devices. Blake’s tyger makes you feel something powerful and so do the poems I love best, and which I want to publish in the magazine.

I am extremely lucky to have a wonderful editorial team around me: Rakhshan Rizwan, Kate Wakeling and Helen Steffens. I have spent countless happy hours talking about poetry and writing for children with these incredible women, and they bring a vast range of expertise to the magazine, as readers and writers and lovers of children’s literature. I am excited and honoured that they will be helping me to choose the poems for each issue.

The artwork for the magazine is by the hugely talented Imogen Foxell. She was the first artist I thought of – I’d encountered her work via The Poetry Society’s Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, and her magical, characterful illustrations exactly chimed with my vision for the magazine. I absolutely love the logo and the tygers she has created; they are compelling creatures, full of dreamy majesty and mystery, and they pounce and prowl off the page.

The website will be fully launched soon, with details of the first call for submissions, and the first twelve poems will launch in January 2022. In the meantime, you can sign up to the mailing list to keep up to date with new issues and submission opportunities. You can also follow Tyger Tyger Magazine on our new Twitter account, @tygertygermag. Join in and help us to burn bright!

Rachel Piercey

Rachel Piercey writes for adults and for children. Her poetry picture book, If You Go Down to the Woods Today (Magic Cat, illustrated by Freya Hartas), came out in March 2021 and has been translated into nineteen different languages. Her latest poetry pamphlet is Disappointing Alice (HappenStance Press, 2019). www.rachelpierceypoet.com

Children's Poet and Educator

Rachel Piercey: Charles Causley and Endings

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

Children's Poet and Educator

Rachel Piercey: Ode to my Tap

Ode to my Tap

With World Water Day coming up in March, I thought I would use my blog to share a poetry workshop which always seems to inspire lovely poems: ‘Ode to My Tap’. The workshop, which I use with Years 4, 5 and 6, explores the importance of access to clean water, as well as encouraging imaginative imagery and metaphors.

Children are naturally passionate advocates for environmental and humanitarian issues and in my experience they really take to this theme, blending the overt message with playful language. It is also an accessible introduction to the concept of an ‘Ode’.

First, I share with the class some of the shocking statistics around access to clean water:

1 in 4 people on the planet don’t have a decent toilet of their own.
1 in 10 people don’t have access to water close to home.
31% of schools around the world don’t have clean water.

(There are lots of useful resources including lesson plans and videos on www.wateraid.org).

I explain that many children have to miss school and skip playing with friends to go and collect clean water, which is often miles away from their home. If children and adults must spend hours each day collecting water, it can prevent them from training for and pursuing the jobs they would like to do.

I tell them that this got me thinking about the importance of something I have always taken for granted – my taps! And so I decided to write an ode, which is a poem in praise of a particular thing. Poets have written odes to all sorts of things – autumn, wind, sadness, music, silence, “a large tuna in the market”… you can write an ode to anything you like!

Ode to My Tap

My tap is a silver swan.

My tap is a silken roar.

My tap knocks shyly

on its own white door –

drip, drop, drip…

My tap is cold sips.

My tap grows a twisting vine.

My tap is tea-time,

and bath-time,

and squeaky-clean teeth

feel just fine.

My tap speaks tap,

which to the human ear

is a judder in the pipes.

My tap has a hot temper

and a cold shoulder.

My tap is ease.

My tap is a liquid key.

My tap is me being free

to be me.

We spend a couple of minutes looking at the different poetic techniques – metaphor, personification, onomatopoeia, alliteration, contrast, use of the five senses, use of rhyme (which I have kept deliberately fluid…pun half-intended…!). Then they are off writing their own poems!

If pupils are having trouble getting started, I ask them to draw a little picture of their tap, then we chat about what the shape reminds them of (e.g. the spout could be a rainbow, a candy cane, a giraffe…the tap handles could be a flower or a hand…). If they don’t want to draw, we might collaborate on some sound effects – a dripping tap, a tap turned on fully etc – and discuss what these sound like.

These Tap Odes lend themselves to illustration – the poem flowing out of the tap is particularly popular. You could also build on this workshop by asking pupils to write a poem in the voice of water, or to write an ode about something else surprising.

If you do write Odes to Your Taps, I’d love to see them! Please feel free to contact me through my website for some class feedback or tag me on Twitter @RachelPoet

Rachel Piercey

Rachel Piercey is a freelance writer, editor and tutor. She co-edited and contributed to the children’s poetry anthologies Falling Out of the Sky: Poems about Myths and Monsters (shortlisted for the CLiPPA award 2016), Watcher of the Skies: Poems about Space and Aliens, and The Head that Wears a Crown: Poems about Kings and Queens, all published by the Emma Press. She regularly performs and runs poetry workshops in schools, and she has taught courses on writing poetry for children for The Poetry School. Her poems for adults have been published in The Rialto, Magma, Butcher’s Dog and The Poetry Review, as well as pamphlets with the Emma Press and HappenStance. rachelpierceypoet.com

Children's Poet, Children's Poetry Editor

Rachel Piercey: Conversation and Crossover

Conversation and Crossover

I started writing for children a few years ago, when I co-edited the Emma Press anthology Falling Out of the Sky: Poems about Myths and Monsters, and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. It has introduced me to a gigantic new group of readers, writers and co-creators, and a whole new library of joyous, devastating, transcendent poems. It has also given me valuable insights, particularly in terms of clarity and energy, into my writing ‘for adults’.

This was a distinction I had never made before, and one I am keen to blur. The world of children’s poetry makes plenty of room for adult poems, in anthologies and school lessons, and children are gloriously open-minded about deep, experimental creativity. The best children’s poems discuss the same big, knotty themes as adult poems, skilfully balancing accessibility with complexity. Now I would like to see the adult poetry world making more space for children’s poetry, which is a vital part of its foundation and future. I would love to get more people discussing, reviewing and enthusing about children’s poetry, and to encourage more poets to try writing for a younger audience.

Kate Wakeling is one of many poets, including me, who published their first poem for children in the Myths and Monsters anthology. Like many of the poets, she got hooked. And just two years later, Kate won the 2017 Centre for Literacy in Primary Poetry Award with her extraordinary debut Moon Juice. I’ve been in the audience when Kate has read children’s poems (my favourite is her shatteringly superb ‘The Demon Mouth’) alongside adult poems – and it’s an exhilarating combination. I wish more readings would mix the two, amplifying in a small but effective way the conversation between poetry for children and poetry for adults. In fiction, the young adult genre acts as a kind of bridge between children’s books and general novels, but we don’t really have an equivalent in poetry. To move, with no turning back, from the warm, fizzy, inviting world of children’s poetry to the secondary school canon can be disorientating. But if children’s poems were part of the general poetry conversation, sharing the same space, young people could study new, chewy works alongside more digestible ones.

So, let’s disrupt the distinction wherever we can. Let’s make more noise about the many children’s poets who are writing well-crafted, sensitive, probing poems about human emotions and the world around us, and zingy, experimental poems which push and pull language like plasticine – via social media, blogs, readings, and conversations with poetry friends. (If you’re looking for somewhere to start, the Children’s Poetry Archive is a great resource, as are the fabulous archives of the CLiPPA award. The Emma Press children’s list is also full of excellent, eclectic poems – many by poets new to writing for children.)

If you are a poet writing for adults, try reaching back the other way – remembering and celebrating the poems you loved as a kid. Try your hand at writing for children and share what you write, enjoying the licence for giddiness and experimentation. And costumes – see photo above!

Ultimately, what I would really love is to see magazines and journals accepting children’s poems and reviewing children’s poetry books as a matter of course, and even to see children’s poetry potentially in the running for the big prizes, acknowledged for its world-altering potential. Welcoming children’s poetry into the ecosystem of adult poetry would be such a powerful message that what we read when we are young is as precious and important as what we read when we are older. And the more young readers and writers of poetry we can nurture, the more secure that ecosystem will be.

Rachel Piercey

Rachel Piercey is a freelance writer, editor and tutor. She co-edited and contributed to the children’s poetry anthologies Falling Out of the Sky: Poems about Myths and Monsters (shortlisted for the CLiPPA award 2016), Watcher of the Skies: Poems about Space and Aliens, and The Head that Wears a Crown: Poems about Kings and Queens, all published by the Emma Press. She regularly performs and runs poetry workshops in schools, and she has taught courses on writing poetry for children for The Poetry School. Her poems for adults have been published in The Rialto, Magma, Butcher’s Dog and The Poetry Review, as well as pamphlets with the Emma Press and HappenStance. rachelpierceypoet.com