Answering Back

What a wonderful bird the Zoom are
When we there we here almost;
When we mute we speak almost.
We ain’t got no sense hardly;
We ain’t got no near hardly either.
When we write, we write what we ain’t got almost.

The last weekend in January 2021 has seen the most wonderful flurry of writing events. It is so cheering to hear news of so many of you out there meeting remotely, writing together, sharing closely. Thank you so much, to all of you who take time to organise such meetings.

They mean a great deal.

This weekend I joined the London group led by David Marshall. There were seventeen of us on screen, sharing as a whole group and moving in and out of smaller groups to write and talk together. As always, the session was beautifully prepared and generously shared. David brought such a variety of ideas and resources, so there was great pleasure in writing for ourselves, and much to be taken on into our various classrooms, both face to face and remotely.

Many of us were very taken with an idea from a Poetry Society worksheet developed with the Orwell Society. All the ideas, centred round poetry and political language, are of interest. David introduced us to Malika Booker’s poem, That Force-ripe Morning and to a form new to me, invented by Karen McCarthy Woolf, in which the poet takes another text – in the case of Malika Booker, a political speech - and answers back to it.

That Force-ripe Morning takes the words of a speech by Nigel Farage after the referendum vote. She creates couplets/ couplings using words from the speech in the first line, and her own words answering back in the second:

Dare to dream that the dawn is breaking,
like cracked eggs in we sky, this force-ripe morning

on an independent United Kingdom
where crapo croak he song each morning

this, if the predictons are right, this will be a victory
grabbed like flies snatched with fork tongue flickering.

We found the whole business of answering back to poetry and prose, to poems we want to take issue with, to advice we want to question, full of energy and promise.

Here, also, is the opportunity to use our own voices, our own language, in response to those who speak differently, think differently. Here is Karen McCarthy Woolf, quoted by The Poetry Society.

I wanted to integrate the two voices, but also to subvert or extend what the original writer was
saying. The cadences of the original determined to some degree the tone of the new text. [...] The
response line is intended to act as an asymmetric mirror of the original. You might have rhyme, assonance, repetition, or a variation. [...] The ‘coupling’ is a response to both prose poems and found poems – and to my own experience as a Jamaican-English hybrid Londoner. I think the impulse to unify seemingly disparate parts is part of a larger poetic.

The Poetry Society worksheet can be found here.

David also introduced the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition of community based photographs of the Lockdown 2020. I urge you to have a look at it if you have not already seen it.

The last time that this group met face to face, this time last year, was at the National Portrait Gallery. We long for the time when we will be face to face again, manoeuvring our pots of Earl Grey tea and deliberating between chocolate brownie and lemon drizzle. In the meantime, these groups on Zoom have been lifelines. And we have been inventive and compassionate. Jan told me how she has been writing weekly with a friend, the space both a motivation to write and a time for friendship through writing. It has kept her going, she told me. “It’s a comfortable place, It’s a world of words. It’s your own place where you can go to.”

We need those places. Theresa Gooda and her Sussex writers explored a sense of place. She writes “It turns out of course that place resonates more strongly than ever when we are ‘locked down’.”

Alison Jermak has circulated around her group, a wonderful on-line booklet of ideas for diary writing, remembering Anne Frank at this time.

Marjory Caine and her group wrote about winter weather on Saturday. As always, Marjory brought a treasure trove of resources to the group. I was only sorry not to be able to join them for sharing.

Marjory did, however, mention Gigantic Cinema A Weather Anthology edited by Alice Oswald and Paul Keegan. Since it was the second time I had heard the title recommended in as many days, I pass the recommendation on to you. Here’s a link to the Scottish Poetry Library’s review.

And I could not resist including Marjory’s prompt for a short-write:

‘A thunder-storm came on while we were at the inn, and Coleridge was running bare-headed to enjoy the commotion of the elements’

Write for 10 minutes on an experience, real or imagined or both, of winter weather. Place a character or two in the landscape/cityscape, ‘bare-headed’ and let them loose!

Thank you, Marjory! And thank you and good wishes to all of you who are still meeting and writing together. We are so lucky!

What You Need To Keep Warm

I have been thinking about the place that writing can have in people’s lives.

I have said before that writing is a human activity. In fact, people are at the core of any writing, whether as writer or reader or subject. That seems to be overlooked by most recent directives about teaching writing. The emphasis on technical accuracy and grammatical knowledge, on textual features and such, has overshadowed what it means to write.

In our writing groups we experience directly the ways that writing transforms us, both individually and as a community.

We reflect on our own lives and those of others. We shape and re-shape thoughts and feelings. We travel into our hearts. We travel across the globe.

During our last Norwich Writing Teachers meeting we wrote in response to a poem written by Neil Gaiman for the UN Refugee Agency UK: What you need to keep warm. The Agency invited people across the world to send in drawings and paintings in response to the words and then created this video.

When we wrote, we thought of both physical and abstract things that warm us. Emily Rowe shared the video with her Year 5/ 6 class who are isolated at the moment and learning at a distance. One wrote about how hearing ‘Well done, that’s great,’ makes you feel warm. And here are more:

The warmth of a smile
Hugs and fire
A snuggle with grandad
Hot chocolate
Cups of tea
My hot water bottle
Friendship and family

Sometimes, even the warmth of a smile is hidden behind a face mask. That is why I would add the unexpected gift of words to my list of things that warm us.

There is a saying that firewood warms twice -once when you saw the logs, and again as it burns in the hearth. Perhaps words can warm three times, once as you write, twice as you give them, a third time as they are read.

Blue sky between clouds

I have been thinking of all my writing friends – those that I already know and those I am yet to meet. I am hoping that you are well and that you have managed to allow writing to be present somewhere in the new rhythms of your life. I find that, even if I simply write down the bare bones of my day, it helps to anchor me when all else seems adrift.

Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary: “I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.” Writing the everyday and the ordinary, captures for me the extraordinary.

And this morning a writing teacher sent me the link to Kate Clanchy’s poetry prompt of the day on Twitter. Frank O’Hara’s poem Today just hit the spot: that celebration of the things that populate our world:

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they've always talked about

still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.

There is a sudden proliferation of such prompts and you will find those that work for you. I am reminded that it is nearly April and that it is the poetry equivalent of National Novel Writing Month. It is worth a go at http://www.napowrimo.net.  

There is so much to talk about!

What I really want to think about this week is the blue sky. The opportunity that stands before us at the moment. Last week, as I thought of teachers stepping forward to prepare work for children at home and to care for others at school I began to wonder what I would have done with my own children, if they had been directed to stay at home. I am not sure they would have taken kindly to daily maths and English.

What would be important? What would I be wanting them to learn? The general coverage of what is beginning to be called ‘home schooling’ reveals a conceptualisation of education, of what school means, that fills me with dismay. That sense that it is ‘done unto’ children rather than children being willing partners in the venture.

In many homes children’s experiences will be rich and challenging. They will have the chance to take hold of their own education and to interact with adults in important ways. Many more will have a different experience. And gaps will widen.

There will be no exams and no testing. Things will not fall apart. We can get to the nub of things. What do we mean by education? What will benefit us all, adults and children, wherever we are in the coming months, and then, maybe, beyond?

Let us seize the chance. Let’s think about what our vision is for the education of children. We have the opportunity to consider it anew; to think carefully about how children might best spend their time. We can think about the children and young people we teach, whom we know well. What are the things that will enrich their lives; help them develop; be fundamental into their becoming the persons they have the capacity to be?

Despite the circumstances, this seems exciting to me. If I am to understand this correctly, no one (except teachers) seems to be expecting any teaching or learning to be going on. So here we are. 

What is it about your own discipline that you love and wish to share with those you teach? What would you like to include, freely, in your teaching without having to squeeze it between the cracks? Perhaps we can begin with writing. 

Now is the time to re-imagine education.