Poetry is …any utterance that sings in a short space: to sing we need all the resources of language -sound, rhythm, beauty and toughness.
Kim Stafford
And we need playfulness, community, a belief in each other and enabling spaces.
It is a day for celebrating poetry on October 8th. I hope that poetry is in your life most days and that today you have a chance to set aside some special time for it. I think we really need poetry at the moment and that we need to find the nooks and crannies that might hold it during the day. That might mean writing with others, or alone; it might mean pausing to read from a loved anthology or exploring something new; you might choose to write down a poem or a part of a poem and send it at as a gift or you might look to Youtube to find a poet reading their own work.
Years ago, I was sent off to train to be an Ofsted inspector. We were locked in a basement room whilst we watched videos and listened to the recited script of the trainer. Sometimes we had to write judgements. At the end of one day, I went up to my hotel room and switched on the television. It was National Poetry Day. There on the screen, poets were reading. One after another, they spoke their poems directly to me. And I found that tears were coursing down my cheeks. What they brought to me was all that had been absent in that basement room: imagination, truth, warmth and surprise, the music of words and human connection and responsibility. Children, especially, discover that they can love poetry and that they are poets. It has a vital part to play in the living and healing that we are engaged in just now.
In the late 1970s, Kenneth Koch discovered the pleasures of writing poetry with children in New York schools. He came to understand the fundamental value of treating children like poets, realising that it ‘was not a case of humorous but effective diplomacy, as [he] had first thought, it was the right way to treat them because it corresponded to the truth.’ Writing can play a crucial part in our well-being and good health. I have always believed that writing is a form of play equal in seriousness and pleasure to forms of play we see amongst young children. It came as no surprise to learn that, when engaged in creative activities, an adult’s brain is fully engaged in the exactly same way as the brain of a child is engaged when they are busy playing. A poet friend of mine recommended this short TED talk by Lynda Barry and I pass on the recommendation. In it, she speaks about play and about her notion of ‘the image world’ in contributing to our mental health.
Lynda Berry is an engaging and thought-provoking storyteller -watch it, if only for the story of the boy’s conversation with the piece of bacon he is about to eat. And think about how, in our classrooms and with other teachers we can read and write poetry together for the joy and goodness of it. Kenneth Koch discovered to his surprise that the children he worked with much preferred writing poetry at school than at home. He writes:
“There was also the fact of their all being there in the room, writing together. No time for self-consciousness or self-doubts: there was too much writing and talking and jumping around.”
Go and read some poems. Listen to some poems.
Get together with others and write and talk and jump around.
Whoop, whoop for poetry day!