Hardly a week goes by without a warning about how educationally detrimental it is for children to spend hours of every day screen-gazing and message-sending. But now there’s a note of dissent ” from the poet laureate, no less, who says she believes texting is an ideal springboard to good poetry-writing.
“The poem is a form of texting … it’s the original text,” says Carol Ann Duffy . “It’s a perfecting of a feeling in language ” it’s a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. We’ve got to realise that the Facebook generation is the future ” and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them. It’s a kind of time capsule ” it allows feelings and ideas to travel big distances in a very condensed form.”
Duffy, who became Britain’s first female poet laureate in 2009, is passionate about the teaching of poetry in school. She believes there’s a myth that poetry is considered “difficult” or “complicated” by teachers ” but says that’s simply not borne out by what’s really going on in the nation’s classrooms, where poetry is enjoying a major revival. “The poem is the literary form of the 21st century,” she says. “It’s able to connect young people in a deep way to language … it’s language as play.” Just, one might say, as text messaging is language at play.
So, if texting is preparing children for a lifetime of poetry, are today’s youngsters better at poetry than children in the past? “I think it’s most obvious in music,” says Duffy. “If you look at rapping, for example, a band like Arctic Monkeys uses lyrics in a poetic way. And using words in an inventive way is at the heart of youth culture in every way.”
Duffy says she owes her career as a poet to her exposure to poetry at school in the 1960s and early 70s, when she was growing up ” and that’s why she’s determined to do all she can to further strengthen its place in the curriculum. “I grew up in a bookless house ” my parents didn’t read poetry, so if I hadn’t had the chance to experience it at school I’d never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, MissScriven and Mr Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.”
When one of her English teachers died, Duffy wrote a poem containing the lines: “You sat on your desk / swinging your legs, reading a poem by Yeats / to the bored girls, except my heart stumbled and blushed / as it fell in love with the words and I saw the tree / in the scratched old desk under my hands, heard the bird in the oak outside scribble itself on the air.”
Duffy says when she realised how much she loved poetry, she started to keep a notebook with her favourite poems in it. “I’d write them out by hand, and it was that very physical act that led me to become a writer. It was quite an intimate experience of poetry, and that’s what I’d like us to go back to now with children.”
To this end, Duffy will on Wednesday launch Anthologise, a competition for secondary school pupils, which invites them to create their own poetry anthologies. “They can do it any way they want, and they can be any sort of group they want ” so it can be a class, or it can be a poetry group in a school, or it can simply be one pupil,” she explains. “The anthology can be organised in any way they want ” it can be themed, or it can be issue-led … anything they choose. They’ll be given a budget, and they’ll also have to think about how to cost it ” so, for example, they’ll have to think about whether they’ll have to pay fees for reproducing poems, and, if so, they’ll have to think about how much these fees are.”
The idea behind the competition, says Duffy, is to foster a stronger relationship between children and the whole poetry arena ” encouraging them to think about the wider issues around poetry, but also encouraging them to read widely, and to experience ” as she herself did ” a more intimate relationship with poems. “I feel it will lead to new writing,” she says.
The deadline for entries to the competition is 1 March 2012, and as well as Duffy the judges include Gillian Clarke, the national poet of Wales; Liz Lochhead , the Scottish makar (national poet); and the Cambridge professor of children’s poetry Morag Styles. The winning anthology will be announced three months after the closing date, and it will be published by Picador with a foreword by Duffy, who will also visit the winning school.
“What I hope this competition will do is put some control into the hands of the students themselves,” says Duffy. “They will be able to create their own anthologies, and it will help to enhance the way poetry is taught in school.”
Duffy’s work is studied in schools at GCSE and A-level ” but, while she tirelessly tours the country visiting schools, her connection with the world of education has not been without its controversies. In 2008, her Education for Leisure, a poem about violence, was removed from the AQA examination board’s GCSE poetry anthology after a complaint about its references to knife crime and a goldfish being flushed down the toilet.
Duffy has always maintained that the poem ” which opens with the words “Today I am going to kill something. Anything / I have had enough of being ignored and today / I am going to play God” ” is anti-violence.
After Anthologise, she reveals, she has even bigger plans for poetry in schools. “What I’d like to do is create anthologies for other school subjects ” for history, for geography, for maths,” she says. “Ithink poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way. So you’d have a maths lesson, and the teacher would hand out a poem about mathematics. Poetry is a different way of seeing something, and seeing a subject in a different way is often a very good tool to better learning.”