Secondary English teacher Theresa Gooda reflects on a week of poetry and shares some thoughts for classroom writing.
In the month of National Poetry Day, and in the aftermath of hearing wonderful poets last weekend at the Shelley Memorial Project Poetry prize 2023, I feel bombarded by poetry, and more inspired than ever to use poetry as a stimulus for writing in the classroom.
Roger McGough, photo credit: Allan Melia
The Shelley event included music-accompanied performances of some of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most famous poems, including Ozymandias and To a Skylark, plus part of The Masque of Anarchy, and an original piece of music inspired by the latter, Rise Like Lions. It was a refreshing new way to meet old friends.
The prompt for this year’s poetry writing competition, judged by Simon Zec, was ‘the spirit of rebellion’ and the winning poems were suitably stirring and protest-themed.
The climax of the evening was a peformance by Roger McGough which included some of his best-loved poems from across his extensive career. He signed my copy of The Mersey Sound, and, although I didn’t know it then, along with Brian Patten, Roger McGough was probably one of the most important poetic influences on me as a child.
What was remarkable about the poetry across the evening, past and present, was the way that poems ‘spoke’ to each other. Roger McGough performed poems that were in conversation with Dylan Thomas and Allan Ginsberg, amongst others. One poem, which made me laugh out loud, had Dylan Thomas plagiarising lines for Under Milk Wood by eavesdropping on the punters in Brown’s Hotel. The prize winners had, of course been inspired by Shelley, some directly, others more obliquely.
Also over the weekend, Poetry by Heart’s poem of the week dropped into my inbox: Cottage, by Eleanor Farjeon. The email suggested ways of structuring a choral performance of the poem, but I was struck by the simplicity of the list, which involves counting up to 12 with lots of objects to that the speaker wishes to fill the cottage that they are confident that they will one day live in:
Four giddy Goats,
Five Pewter Pots,
Six silver Spoons,
for example. It struck me that it would be a great poem to use as a writing prompt across the key stages.
I quite liked thinking about all the lovely things I’d put in my own dream shepherd’s hut of the future.
I think myYear 7s would enjoy the alliteration, and I imagine that students in KS1 and KS2 would appreciate the number structure.
I shall find a way to use it this week, and poetry more widely, in the spirit of rebellion against a rigid curriculum that doesn’t seem to allow much space for creative thinking at the moment.