Rhyme and Reason

(or How it all began)

Rhyme and reason

It all started more or less by chance. I’d been teaching English for seven years

and had just had my first pamphlet of poems published. I was booked to do a

reading, which was funded by the Poetry Society, and was sent a questionnaire.

In the ‘Further comments’ section I said that I’d be interested in joining the

Poets in Schools scheme. This was funded by WH Smith and a school got two poets

for two days for free.

A year went by, then one day I got a call asking me if I’d like to work with the

poet Pete Morgan in a school in Cumbria. I already knew Pete – no worries about

getting on with my co-worker – so it was just a matter of getting time off

school to go. No problem there either. THAT woman had been Prime Minister for

only three years, unions were still a force to be reckoned with and the only

people who ‘delivered’ were the Post Office and the local dairy. I agreed to

give up my next 16 free periods and run the bookstall at the Christmas Fair

and, in return, the time off was granted.

I learned a lot. Pete was a joy to work with. The children were primed and the

teachers all knew poetry mattered. Nobody used the word ‘text’. The only

disappointment, apparently, was me. The children didn’t think I looked like a

poet. It was my first booking so I’d actually had a haircut and was wearing my

best jacket and a collar and tie. I didn’t make that mistake again.

I carried on with the Poets in School scheme until it was finally wound up. I

can’t remember the official reason WH Smith gave, but I suspected that some

accountant thought it wasn’t profitable and was therefore worthless. I was

sorry to see it end, but it had helped me in a number of ways. I was now getting

enough work from schools to be able to change from full-time to part-time

teaching and I’d started writing for children myself. Usborne Books had asked

the Poetry Society for a list of poets who might want to contribute to a new

anthology of poems for children. And it wanted new poems, not reprints of work

by people who’ve been dead long enough it isn’t necessary to pay anyone to

reproduce their work.

‘Writing poems for kids,’ I thought. ‘Easy.’ I rattled off half a dozen verses

and tried them out on some eight-year-olds. It was a sobering, painful

experience. They told me my poems were ‘boring’. They were right. They were

preachy and had no emotional impact. I’d settled for the ‘It’s worthy...that’ll

do’ school of writing.

I phoned the poet Matt Simpson and we talked for a good hour or more. He

reminded me that all really good poems ‘should recreate an emotion or an

experience for the reader’ He suggested I forget trying to write for children

and just write what came to me instead. ‘And avoid contemporary references,’ he

said. ‘They date your work.’ Sound advice. I was back in school the following

day and while on break duty had to separate two 14-year-olds who were

half-killing each other behind the bike sheds. One kept saying: 'I didn’t mean

to hit him Sir, I was just messing.'

I was just...' That phrase stayed in my head and when I got home, I sat down

and wrote:

I was just

Teaching our cat to swim

And suddenly

The bathroom was flooded

Four more verses wrote themselves. It was about as far away from a worthy poem

as you could get and, to my amazement, was accepted. Teachers have since told me

that its very grimness has given them starting points for discussions on cruelty

and how it often grows out of ignorance and emotional carelessness rather than

an intrinsically evil nature.

‘Avoid contemporary references...’ With that advice in mind, I stopped talking

at children and began talking to them. I discovered that the trappings of our

respective childhoods were different – when I was a kid TV was black and white,

computers existed only in sci-fi films etc – but there were constants. We’d all

been worried about the fluff monster that lurked under the bed. The death of a

family pet was devastating. Being the new kid was no fun at all. We didn’t like

bullies.

My poems began to change. I wrote about ghosts, a pet dog that ‘bites the heads

off rats’ but at night pillows your head and guards you ‘from the Gloom’. I

wrote about how lousy it felt to be bullied because you were overweight and how

you were overweight because you were bullied. It was liberating to find that I

could write poems for children that I could be proud of as poems.

I found that writing poetry isn’t just fun; it can be so much more than that.

Over and over I’ve seen under-achievers begin to shine as they discover that

problems with spelling etc are no bar to the imagination. In fact, I’d go

further. The notion that there’s no wrong answer in poetry had a real and

positive impact on children who usually gave up before they’d even started

because they were convinced that they were bound to fail and, therefore, there

was no point in even trying.

In one school where I worked for three consecutive terms running an after-school

poetry club, a boy with learning difficulties improved his reading age by four

years in two terms. And that wasn’t down to me. I was merely a vehicle. It was

the profound effect of poetry itself.

Given a writing exercise, an adult will often ask, ‘What’s the point of this

exercise?’ Children will write for the best reason there is: the joy of it.

Adults want their work to ‘say something’. Children will just write. If their

piece has an implied subtext, all the better, but they rarely set out to make a

point. They just write what comes.

I remember one girl writing a poem about Mars. She described the surface as

looking like ‘a crumpled duvet.’ Her last two lines read :

On Mars everything’s red.

Even the silence.

I’d sell my soul for an image like that!

When I asked her how she’d thought of it, she adopted a long-suffering air of someone arguoing patiently with a lunatic– she was eight – and said: “I didn’t think of it. It just came to me.” Then she paused and added: “It was inspiration.”

In 1991, I finally left teaching altogether to write full time. I thought I’d

continue with schools for a few more years at most. I imagined that it would

only be matter of time before I was headlining literary festivals and appearing

on telly. The airs and graces we give ourselves !

Thirty-four years later and I’m still waiting for the phone to ring…