The Opening Line: Inspiring Young Poets in Secondary Schools

Inspiring Young Poets in Secondary Schools

The Poetry Society

22 Betterton Street, London

WC2H 9BX, UK

www.poetrysociety.org.uk

Cover: James Brown, jamesbrown.info

© The Poetry Society & authors, 2026

ISBN: 978-1-911046-44-8

The Poetry Society is the UK’s leading organisation for poetry. With innovative education and commissioning programmes, and a packed calendar of performances and readings, The Poetry Society champions poetry for all ages. The Poetry Society is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation and a registered charity.

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The Foyle Foundation

The Foyle Foundation was established in 2000 as an independent grant-making trust to distribute grants to UK-based charities (primarily arts and learning) and schools. The Foundation’s long-planned spend down and closure took place in December 2025, by when it had distributed over £180M in total, including a number of legacy projects with longterm benefit. The Foyle Foundation has invested in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award since 2001, one of its longest partnerships, during which time it has developed and grown to become one of the premier literary awards in the country. Throughout its history, the Foyle Young Poets Award has also supported teachers to champion poetry in schools. The Foyle Foundation awarded a major legacy grant to The Poetry Society to support the continued delivery of the Award for ten years from 2026.

Acknowledgements

The Poetry Society is deeply grateful for the funding and commitment of the Foyle Foundation, and for the ongoing support of Arts Council England: together they enable the running of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award and the production of accompanying teaching resources like this one.

We are very grateful to Shân Maclennan for commissioning much of the material included in this compendium, and for championing the project from the offset. Thank you to James Brown for designing the artwork. Many thanks to all the contributors for sharing their knowledge and creativity so generously. Particular thanks to Teacher Trailblazers Catherine Bruton and Gareth Ellis for their advice in assembling the content.

Finally, thank you to all the young poets who have inspired The Poetry Society’s education programmes over many years: several generations of former Foyle Young Poets of the Year are represented within these pages, and it is a joy to see them go from strength to strength.

Inspiring Young Poets in Secondary Schools

A compendium of teaching exercises for writing, reading and performing poetry

A LETTER TO MY TEACHER

Dear Teacher,

I want you to help me become a poet.

I want us to write how we feel, the taste of happiness, our identity, the world around us and the world before us, our roots. I want us to go outside and write the grass and the ants and the trees and buildings around us.

Don’t grade us on our spelling, our use of metre, fancy vocabulary. Here are your assessment objectives: did you feel something? Learn something? See the world a little differently? I don’t think that poetry can be assessed or measured – just appreciated. I want you to help us appreciate poetry.

I want you to teach us about other poets like us; Shakespeare was great and everything, but do we have to keep looking back all the time? I want to learn about poets of the now. I want to read Black poets, gay poets, D/deaf poets, non-binary poets, poets on the autism spectrum. I want to know about the dead poets who aren’t appreciated enough.

I think before we look at poems with a magnifying glass and try to decipher their meanings, we should listen to the music of them and enjoy them.

Teach us how poetry can make a difference. I think if other people knew that poetry can change things then they’d want to write poems too. I want us to use poems to change things, to save our environment and save each other.

Teacher, I hope you can bring out the poet in all of us.

Yours sincerely, Lauren

INTRODUCTION

The Poetry Society has always stood for the transformative power of poetry. For over fifty years, we have been connecting poets and schools, encouraging young people to write, read, remember and perform poetry authentically in the ways that speak to them. This compendium, generously supported by The Foyle Foundation, gathers contributions from poets, educators, and young writers, all of whom have direct personal experience of being in the classroom. They offer an abundance of suggestions for how to approach poetry in a school environment and they share a common goal: to empower teachers to shape the next generation of poets.

Many of the contributors to this volume were winners of The Poetry Society’s Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, supported by the Foyle Foundation since 2001. They have gone on to become some of the most celebrated poets writing today. That they have generously offered to share their knowledge and passion for poetry with teachers is testament to the lasting legacy poetry education can have.

The Opening Line is primarily for teachers, youth workers, and other adults who work with learners in secondary schools. Secondary school is a serious business. The years young people spend in education as teenagers, preparing for exams, are also those in which they start to explore and experiment with who they are and where they belong in the world. They are working out what they believe in, what tribes they want to belong to, and how they will take the steps to

build their future lives. Poetry remains one of the most accessible ways for young people to examine their thoughts and feelings as they emerge into adulthood, and to share them with others. As Jasmine Simms says in her piece ‘Becoming a Poet in the Classroom’, ‘the most important and yet least discussed function of creative writing for young people [is] the opportunity to safely try on different versions of ourselves.’

As its title indicates, The Opening Line is just that: a place to begin, the first step in fostering a poetic culture in your school. Some of the exercises here will equip you with ways into reading or memorising poems; others will help generate ideas for students’ own writing. Throughout, you will find suggestions for how The Poetry Society can help you and your students to continue engaging with poetry in the long term. Poets aged 11–17 can enter our Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, while young poets aged 5–25 can explore Young Poets Network, our free online platform for emerging writers. To maintain enthusiasm for poetry in your school, you might consider starting a poetry club or using our Poets in Schools service to book a visiting poet. As teachers, you can continue your own professional development by joining our free poet-teacher network, Cloud Chamber, while our dedicated site for learning resources, Poetryclass, offers downloadable lesson plans you can sort by age and theme. All of these activities can contribute to your Artsmark journey or your students’ Arts Award portfolios. However you choose to explore poetry, we’re here to support you.

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How to Use This Book

The advice in The Opening Line has been deliberately commissioned so that, for the most part, it takes you and your students away from the pressures of preparing for exams. We believe that the time you spend with young people on the ideas here – time we know can be hard to find – will feed back into your everyday lessons in ways that may be unexpected and delightful. If you are feeling inspired, you may find ways to integrate these ideas into the exploration of set texts.

All the ideas in The Opening Line can be adapted to suit the age, ability and personalities of the young people in your class or group. As teachers, you will know best what works for your group: we encourage you to explore any recommended reading yourself in advance of sharing it with your class, and to trust yourself in adapting any of the creative exercises suggested here.

The book starts with a series of meditations on what it is to be a poet, written by poets who began their careers as teenagers. This section will ease you into the mindset of becoming a poet: you may wish to share passages with your students to inspire them, or use it to reflect on your own approach to reading, writing and teaching poetry. Part Two begins with the premise that poets do not spring up in isolation: good writers are also good readers, and the more poetry students consume the greater their confidence will be. There are reading recommendations from young poets aged 17–21, ideas for how to read creatively and normalise poetry in the school environment, and explorations of ‘found’ poems, which bridge the gap between reading and writing. In Parts Three and Four, we move on to explore writing activities, first with a range of quick-fire exercises designed to get the creative juices flowing, then with more extended activities that work towards a complete poem. Finally, in Part Five, the focus switches to performing poetry, covering how to memorise a poem by heart, script a poem for performance, and polish the performance until it gleams.

The book is not designed to be read sequentially from cover to cover; rather, you are free to dip in and out of it, combine and adapt exercises as you wish. Each activity is preceded by a succinct summary of what it contains. Headings at the beginning of each section show you at a glance what that section will cover and signpost resources to help you take the ideas explored there further.

Go to bit.ly/PoetrySocietyOpeningLine for links to all the next steps suggested here and to many of the poems used as examples throughout the book.

The majority of activities here require only pens and paper, or access to a whiteboard (or similar). Occasionally you will need scissors or glue. You will also need access to a diverse source of poetry, for example, in a library or online. The Poetry Society has a free online poems database, which includes lots of poems by young people, including online anthologies by Foyle Young Poets of the Year .

For further advice about using this book, or any of The Poetry Society’s resources, please don’t hesitate to contact the education team at educationadmin@poetrysociety.org.uk

This key will help you navigate The Opening Line:

Reading Suggestion Next Steps

Part One Think Like a Poet

This section is all about opening yourself up to a poetic mindset, trusting your instincts when facilitating a writing session and helping your students see that anyone can be a poet.

This section at a glance:

Jasmine Simms reflects on the experience of becoming a poet at school and urges teachers to help their students think of themselves as writers. Jasmine is a former Foyle Young Poet of the Year, who began to write poetry as a teenager.

Caroline Bird encourages you to give yourself permission to play when planning a poetry workshop. A poet and educator, Caroline was an early winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award.

Anthony Anaxagorou outlines his process for getting into a writerly frame of mind. Anthony is a poet and the founder of Out-Spoken Press.

Read this section as part of your own continuing professional development, or share passages with your students to inspire them. For more CPD opportunities or to network with other teachers and poets who are passionate about using poetry in the classroom, join The Poetry Society’s poet-teacher network, Cloud Chamber.

You can also book a poet to visit your school using The Poetry Society’s Poets in Schools service. Visiting poets run poetry workshops, perform in assemblies, or deliver bespoke CPD. Contact us to find out more.

poetrysociety.org.uk/education educationadmin@poetrysociety.org.uk

JASMINE SIMMS BECOMING A POET IN THE CLASSROOM

Help students to find their inner poet and to recognise that poetry is for everyone.

How might teachers help young people to become poets? I can only begin by telling my own story of becoming a poet in the secondary school classroom, though it could easily be the story of many people. I attended a UK secondary comprehensive school, a common enough experience. Whilst there, I became a poet – somewhat less common, but (I suspect) far more common than is usually admitted.

What does it mean to be a ‘poet’? As poets, we share publicly something of our own uncensored perspective on the world, which makes us vulnerable. Because of this and the reciprocity it tends to inspire, we’re often trusted with the secret artwork of friends and family – poems sent over Facebook Messenger, or passed surreptitiously under pub tables, ‘it’s not very good, but…’. This, from friends I would never have imagined to be writing poetry, has led me to the following conclusion: writing poetry is quite normal. Sure, few would identify as ‘poets’, but many are writing poetry. Without encouragement, without being taught, without even reading much poetry, people are writing poetry.

This is at odds with some oft-expressed ideas: that interest in poetry is in ‘decline’ especially amongst younger people, or that ‘poets’ as a category of genius unto themselves are declining in population. Many have argued against these charges by broadening the category, pointing out that many artistic forms such as rap belong clearly to the oral tradition of poetry. They are right to do so. Yet even the most dogmatic defenders of poetry as an art form that exists firstly on the page would have to admit that, since the rise of so-called ‘Tumblr Poetry’ and poets such as Rupi Kaur, poetry resonates with younger people.

As for the assumption that only ‘poets’, a protected category, are writing poetry…. My (admittedly anecdotal) experience is that most people will admit to having written poetry at least once during their adolescence – perhaps in a time of extreme emotional distress, or in an effort to make sense of a new feeling or experience. If we stretch our definition of art, as we should, to include art made in secret, which is never shared – the confessions of the heart to itself – writing poetry might even be considered ‘popular’.

Yet, when consulted for this compendium, young people asked that teachers make poetry ‘less posh and less scary’. It seems that poetry continues to have a reputation problem. How has this happened? Perhaps through our historical preference for teaching dead poets in the classroom. The classroom is the only existing guarantee that everyone will have, at some point in their life, some exposure to poetry. That’s a heavy weight of responsibility for teachers – too heavy, perhaps, to be considered fair, especially if they do not have the liberty of choosing which texts they teach. Whilst Keats and Shakespeare have much to say which may be of interest to people of any age, this is not always immediately obvious to young readers unused to their language or lacking crucial contextual and experiential knowledge.

Of course, these things can be taught. We can teach the context around a poem and translate the meaning of tricky passages so the poem might be ‘understood’ and studied, and through this, appreciated. But to read a poem for the first time and understand it as though absorbing it, with the accompanying feeling of sudden insight and familiarity – of seeing and being seen – cannot be taught.

I remember the day I first read a poem written in my own vernacular, by Simon Armitage. It had never occurred to me that poetry could be written in what I considered ‘ordinary’ language (Yorkshire being my adolescent definition of ‘ordinary’). Discovering this felt like being given permission to write. It’s why it’s so important to expose students to a diverse range of texts, including poetry written by people like them. Take a look at some of the reading recommendations in this book, or the many poems written by teenagers, available to read on The Poetry Society’s website.

‘If that’s what a poem is’, I thought, upon reading that poem by Simon Armitage, ‘I could have a go at that’. I started writing poems and giving them to my English teacher to read, sometimes slipping them in with my homework. I read somewhere that Sylvia Plath wrote sonnets at the back of physics lectures. So I started writing poems during physics lessons, and then in all my lessons. There’s a poem about these physics lessons in my debut pamphlet, which is dedicated to my English teachers.

Aged sixteen, I was commended in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award for a poem I had written in a GCSE textiles lesson. I still remember writing it, sitting awkwardly at my desk in a Portakabin filled with sewing machines, gazing through the window at the tree under which sixth formers gathered to smoke. This was the poem.

My Monday Morning Girlfriend

Who taught you to love, I wonder.

I catch you round the back of school smoking under a red tree. Your boots look kicked, or like you went dancing and kept them on. Maybe you never ever take them off.

I like the baby blue of your eyes: toxic sky-waste. But the roots of your hair betray you, little ghost blonde.

I wonder, who taught you to love, babe? You are doing it wrong.

Lately I’ve been studying this poem, looking for clues as to how I became a poet. I can see the origins of my current style in it. I can also see the influence of specific poems I’d read in the GCSE anthology and liked, though I wasn’t conscious of this at the time. I was writing it instinctively, compulsively and casually. What’s most ironic is that I wrote this poem before I was particularly aware of my own sexuality, which I wouldn’t write about explicitly again until almost eight years later. I don’t even remember wondering at the time why I had created for myself a girlfriend in this poem. Perhaps I felt I was only trying things on, like poets do – another possible version of myself safely confined to paper.

Such is the most important and yet least discussed function of creative writing for young people, the opportunity to safely try on different versions of themselves, at a time when being anything publicly is terrifying. Years later at university, I was taught that gender is drag, poetry is drag, life is a drag, and it seems to me that these insights relieve much of the pressure of living. There is and will be no ultimate ‘truth’ about me, only poems and essays, the stories I tell people. Before I knew this, I had only poetry, which absorbed my insecurities whilst hinting at these many unanswerable questions of life.

I owe much of my development as a poet after the age of sixteen to other people. One of the most helpful things you could do for your students is support them in finding their poetry community, whether that’s through a regional writing development scheme or a platform like Young Poets Network.

Get in touch with The Poetry Society for more advice about this.

But my becoming a poet in the first place, I owe to myself, and to the teachers who helped me. They helped me simply by communicating that poetry is something I could do – indeed, something any of us could do – and something worth doing. The journey to becoming a poet is (like any great journey in fiction) to be undertaken by the heroine alone. But as teachers we can help them, and we can help them first of all by suggesting that poetry is a thing they might do, as obvious and true to our nature as breathing.

Whenever I work with young people on writing poetry, I like to begin with some group discussion on what poetry is and why we might write it. Here are some of the questions I often use, which you might want to use in your classroom as a starter activity before embarking on any of the brilliant writing exercises suggested elsewhere in this compendium.

• Who writes poems? (Don’t accept ‘anyone’, though true. Ask, ‘who is “anyone”’?)

• What are poems about? (As above, do not accept ‘anything’.)

• What do poems do?

• Why are poems remembered? Why are poems forgotten?

• Where do poems come from? (I’m yet to hear a better answer to this one than Michael Longley’s answer in The Guardian, ‘If I knew where poems came from, I’d go there’.)

• When do people decide to write poems? (Not ‘anytime’.)

THE INEXHAUSTIBLE WELL

Resist analysis and give yourself permission to play.

There is an inexhaustible well of untapped poetry exercises in the world, and several hundred of those exercises are trapped inside your head. As teachers, we can borrow or adapt existing tasks or resources, but don’t feel pressure to make every workshop a living photocopy of one that has already happened. This can create anxiety and imposter syndrome, becoming a glass ceiling that prevents poets and teachers from fully owning their poetry workshops. There are many exercises suggested in this book but, for teachers as for students, this is only a starting point. The truth is that you can invent your own exercises, build your workshops from scratch: you don’t need to be a professional poet to conjure brilliant poems out of other people.

The simplest purpose of a poetry workshop is to generate raw material, to coax pens into moving across the paper, and to lovingly trick your participants into writing a poem they didn’t know they needed to write. The main hurdle is giving yourself permission to change hats from ‘analysis’ to ‘play’, to meet a poem with enough lightness, irreverence, and audacity to let it inspire a new thought.

I’ve been teaching poetry for twenty years and have over five hundred original exercises: some succeeded, some went down like brick budgies. The process never stops, there is never a definitive way – it’s like trying to catch the sky in a net, but the trying is the thing. Here are my tips for getting into the mindset of running a poetry workshop.

Ask yourself ‘what is the game of the poem?’

Flick through some books by your favourite contemporary poets, or an anthology, or even just pull some books at random from the poetry section of a library. Check out The Poetry Society’s free poems database or the fantastic poems written by Foyle Young Poets of the Year, available online.

Find a poem you like. You don’t need to know why, or analyse it, or even be able to speak about it at length. That’s not the point: you are using the poem, not serving it. Read it a few times, then ask yourself ‘What is the game of this poem?’ The game might be ‘turning my dad into a doll’ or ‘deliberately misremembering a childhood event’ or ‘writing the acknowledgements for the book of your own life’ or ‘writing a love poem to an enemy’ or ‘marvelling at a tiny object’. There are multiple games to be found within the same poem, and none are correct or incorrect, so long as you find it interesting. Identifying the game of the poem will help you encourage your students to approach their own writing in interesting ways.

Use contemporary poems

Keats is amazing but if you use him as a prompt your participants will unwittingly descend into archaic parody. It’s important for poets to write in the language of their own time because that is the language of their thoughts, dreams, and secrets.

Resist analysis

It’s important to clarify the difference between analysing a poem and using a poem as a creative prompt. If you hand out a poem and ask the group to analyse it, you risk paralysing their creativity. They may start to feel inferior, as if every line they write needs deep consideration, and it will become impossible for them to write a first draft. In a poetry workshop you want to read the poem once – just once – and talk about it for a maximum of five minutes before launching into a task. The poem is just the springboard. Don’t let them marinate or think ‘my poem needs to mimic this’: just wave it under their faces like a smelling salt to release their imaginations.

Make the prompt sound like a game

‘Write using personification’ is not a game. But ‘turn this emotion into a person, what kind of car do they drive? etc’ is a game. When I’m writing, I never think ‘I’m writing a metaphor now’. I’m just seeing things in my head, wandering down the hallways of my imagination. Therefore, when teaching, I say ‘think in pictures’ rather than ‘use metaphor.’ The language we use when analysing a poem is different from the language of creation.

Try to avoid ‘cookie-cutter’ poems

Cookie-cutter poems, where you provide a template structure to fill in, are always tempting because they seem to promise sure-fire results. However, no one feels true pride if they’ve written a poem with an identical structure to the rest of the group. When a participant says ‘I don’t know what to write’, you say ‘Excellent! That is exactly where you should be starting. With nothing. Every first draft is an act of discovery…’. If your prompt is an interesting enough game, the participants will want to write purely to ‘see where it goes’.

Think about ways of seeing

• What can you ask the group to see differently?

• What insignificant thing can they marvel at?

• What significant thing can they look down upon?

• What new thoughts can they discover within an old memory?

• What feelings can they translate into the language of dreams?

Keep a notebook and write down exercise ideas Not all exercises derive from poems. After a while, prompts might start popping into your head unbidden. You might look at someone talking on the train and think ‘what if you could telephone the underworld and chat to someone?’ You might be at the beach and think ‘what if the “state of happiness” was an actual place?’ (take a look at ‘The Library of Happiness’ by Hannah Lowe later in this book for an extension of this idea). You might be at a birthday party and think ‘write a poem about all the times you’ve been miserable in the proximity of cake.’ Enjoy the bizarre challenge of creating multiple prompts for poems that do not yet exist.

Your own imagination is your best resource Every good exercise is a trick that becomes a selffulfilling prophecy: if you convince a group they can easily write a poem, suddenly they can. But you have to believe it first: your belief in your own imagination is the most necessary encouragement in the room. We are, all of us, bursting with ideas; it’s just about giving ourselves permission to access them.

YOU SIT DOWN TO WRITE

Read widely, learn to trust yourself and your reader.

You sit down to write. Time is on your side. It’s quiet. You turn off your phone. You open a notepad. A word doc. You start to think about language, a bunch of words, then maybe a single word, a phrase, something strange or unfamiliar. Then you have a go at attempting to extract some kind of meaning. Anything. You string a sequence of things together to form an image. You have no idea what any of it could mean, its logic is skewed, but it could be pointing towards something. Like when you find yourself lost in a new city, stopping a local denizen to ask for directions. They lift an arm to signal in a general direction saying, ‘that way’. You trust them and so you keep walking on. The image you have down delights you. You’re not sure why but that’s irrelevant. For now, delight is what matters.

In a few moments, you’ll re-read the line and its allure will seem to have dissipated. It’ll read as flat. Uninteresting. Familiar. Obvious. You’ll no longer trust in the image. Its ability to go out into the wild and live on independently. Nobody will want to participate in this. You can hear the reader grumbling to themselves that this poem is just no good. You’ll press backspace. Scrawl it out. Then go boil the kettle again.

This is a regular occurrence for me whenever I sit down to try and write. It’s difficult enough needing to carve out a window in the daily barrage of emails, meetings and teaching, never mind actually making good use of that precious time. From speaking to fellow poets about how they get going, I’m always interested to learn about the various kick-starter exercises they have in place, ready to be dispensed whenever they hit a creative wall. Many such exercises are included in this book. Personally, I enjoy working out of the unknown.

A younger me depended on having a clear idea as to the kind of poem I wanted to write. Most of the time I knew where the poem was going to end; my job then was to try and work out how I would get there. The poet Douglas Dunn once remarked in an interview with Ian McMillan that he tends to be suspicious of poems that have strong last lines. For him, it signalled the poet had spent their time working towards how they would arrive at that place. It also suggests something conclusive, offering summary, closing the doors to the poem, which runs the risk of kicking the reader out of the experience and relegating them to the role of spectator rather than active participant. You could argue poets who write sonnets also know where the poem will end, on the fourteenth line, they just don’t know how that will happen. Jericho Brown talks often about the idea of letting the poem guide you through it; this positioning of being more passive in the writing process adds an extra layer of liberation. It also means you can write around something rather than attempting to go straight through the centre of an idea. Poems have this unique ability to pull in several disparate subject matters: a more inchoate writer might struggle to invest in this, instead trying to pin down the poem and focus it on one specific thing.

It takes some discipline to trust yourself in this way. To get yourself out into the middle of a field and wait to see what happens. There really is no definitive way to get going, but when I do find myself in a place where nothing I’m coming up with is working, I read. I have several books open at any given time; I can read one line from a poem and have it spark an idea. I often have multiple images or lines in my notebook, which I spill onto the paper; then it’s about knocking things around until they start to take on an argument of their

own. I’m drawn to lines, moments, constructions that fail to make immediate sense.

I read Rachael Allen, Frank O’Hara, C.K. Williams, Terrance Hayes, Layli Long Soldier, Richard Siken, Robin Coste Lewis, Max Ritvo, Emily Berry, Caroline Bird or Jack Underwood to get a lift up.

I try not to close read, I want to get myself out into the deep where I can tread water. When you skydive the plane needs to be at a certain height before you can jump. That’s what I’m really trying to do. Locate the poem’s rhythm. Feel out its walls. Work out how much room I have before starting to play. Ocean Vuong talks about waiting for the poem to realise itself, and how the poet simply becomes the person who enables that.

Simon Armitage advises poets to open the dictionary at a random place, select a word, then begin writing from there. Teju Cole describes the process of writing poetry as being in a highly-strung state, which I can certainly relate to, a place of intense thought and focus, but also of trying to drag something up from the deep.

These days, if I find myself in a place where nothing I’m writing is any good, I pull up a line from my notebook and start to build from there. I don’t need to know where I’m going with it, or if I’m going to keep any of it. It’s become more about learning to trust the blank spaces and being comfortable on the big piste. I’ve also learnt to trust the reader, which again means I resist spelling things out. Leaving poems open to interpretation rather than trying to resolve them grants more agency to the reader. It creates a closer connection and refuses to undermine their imaginative capacity. Last night after a reading in Leeds I was having a beer with a younger poet who wanted to know which poems excite me. And I guess there’s no real proper answer here, only the belief in undiscovered territory. The late poet Les Murray spoke about how it’s impossible to drain the reserve of poetry and language, which is a notion I often think about when I feel boxed in by ideas, or themes, or subjects. What I tell myself is to keep my ear to the shop floor, let the imagination lead, take risks, consider nothing a waste of time, be lateral and divergent when it comes to form and innovation, give your poems energy, allow them to jump, run, swim, sink then resurface.

Part Two Read Creatively

The premise of this section is the idea that good writers are also good readers; the more poetry your students devour, the more confident they will become as writers. By reading creatively, they can bridge the gap between understanding and making poems.

This section at a glance:

We outline some ways to approach reading poems creatively.

Teacher and School Library Manager Gareth Ellis explores how to create a poetry culture in the school environment.

Poet and teacher Catherine Bruton explains how creating a mood board allows students to connect with a poem.

Poet and Professor of Creative Writing Maura Dooley encourages you to normalise poetry in the school environment and introduces ‘found’ poetry.

Poet and educator Caleb Parkin explores using found material to generate new ideas and expand vocabulary.

Former winners of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award suggest the poetry books they would recommend to other young people.

For more ideas about how to approach reading creatively, and for further reading suggestions see The Poetry Society’s website. Get in touch with us for access to poetry posters for your classroom wall.

poetrysociety.org.uk/education educationadmin@poetrysociety.org.uk

CREATIVE READING

Play with the text and straddle a readerly and writerly mindset.

As teachers, you’ll know that reading and writing are two sides of the same coin. Sometimes young people can find reading poetry bewildering, particularly if they feel they’re expected to analyse it. One remedy is to encourage creative forms of reading. Here are some creative approaches to reading; discover reading recommendations by and for young people on The Poetry Society’s website, as well as lots of free poems on our poems database. There, you’ll find lots of poems written by Foyle Young Poets Award winners – this is a good source of poetry your students will connect with, as it has been written by poets their own age.

Fill in the blanks

A fun way to read a poem is to remove some key words and ask students to fill in the blanks. You could do this on a handout or ask them to write their answers on individual whiteboards and hold them up. For example, you might give them ‘Shall I compare thee to a ___?’ and students might suggest ‘tornado’, ‘cat’, ‘jug’. Or ‘I wandered lonely as a ___’ and they might say ‘rhino’ or ‘astronaut’. Compare their answers to the original text and discuss why the poet chose the image they did.

Hot Seating

Hot seating is a drama exercise where you inhabit a character in a text and take it off-script. This can work well with poetry too, especially if the poem you’re looking at has a strong voice or vivid central characters. ‘Examples of poems you could use are Em Power’s ‘CANBURY GARDENS AS A PROSE POEM DOMINATED BY THE WORD ‘LIKE’’, Briancia Mullings’ ‘Queen’s Speech’, or Tara Tulshyan’s ‘Care Package’, all winners of the Foyle Young Poets Award. Ask the students to imagine they are a particular character – what does their daily life look like? where do they live? how do they feel? – and then take turns interviewing one another in character.

Because these exercises asks students to really immerse themselves in the perspective of the poem’s speaker, be careful to choose texts that avoid cultural appropriation and aren’t triggering.

Blackout poetry

Blackout poetry is a form of found poetry (see the next exercises in this section). You create a poem by taking an existing text (this can be any text, eg a newspaper article, but it can be fun to try with a poem) and obscuring sections of it to create a new text from the words that remain. For example, you could transform the opening lines of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘How do I love thee?’ like this:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love the way My soul can feel the end of grace.

The simplest way to do blackout poetry is with a black marker, but you can get even more creative and use collage or illustration to obscure the text. You can find some inspiring examples of blackout poetry on Young Poets Network. As with hot seating, though, be sure to think through the sensitivities of erasing or manipulating existing work when selecting the source text.

Writing back to a poem

People have been writing about love, gender, the climate – and more – for millennia. Ask students to find an existing poem they like and write back to it. Good examples include Russ Russell’s ‘Love Poem to Young Offenders Support Workers’ or Ran Zhao’s ‘Get Up, We’re Going Home’, both Foyle Young Poets Award winners.

GARETH ELLIS

MAKE IT VISIBLE; MAKE IT TANGIBLE

Create a poetry culture in the school environment.

Meet me halfway, celebrate and elevate

For many teenagers and young adults, poetry can suffer from a PR problem. They might argue that it’s boring and difficult and not written for them. They can feel excluded from it. And yet strangely, some of their most memorable literary experiences growing up were poetic. Many teenagers can recite the opening of Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo Most can recall a line from Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. When I ask Year 9 students what their favourite books are, they will often retreat to the safety of the rhyming picture book. They pretend they’re being ironic, but they’re really revealing the great comfort that reading – and especially reading poetry – gave them when they were small. So celebrate and elevate: talk about the childhood favourites alongside some more ‘mature’ works (Robert Frost’s rhythm and rhyme can often make for a useful bridge here). Make their references count. Appreciate their own, personal poetic history (their poetrylect?). Poetry, after all, is as much theirs as anyone else’s.

Plan a poetry reading lesson, or better still, collaborate with your school librarian to deliver a lesson in the library, where students are exposed to poetry’s wide variety. Include the childhood favourites alongside rap, sit the canon and the controversial side by side, read out loud yourself, show video clips – there are lots of videos of poets reading their work on The Poetry Society’s YouTube channel, which can be a fantastic inspiration for your students. And don’t worry too much (or even at all) about feature spotting and analysis. Get them to notice what they notice, where every observation is valuable and valid. Elevate their response. Permit confusion and misunderstanding. Wallow.

Make it visible, make it tangible, tear it down Others in this publication have rightly extolled the virtues of the poetry display, of making poetry part

of a young person’s everyday life, and many schools already do this. But beware of the curse of the invisible display! The painstakingly and lovingly cut, laminated and mounted wall display – so lovingly done that it would be a travesty to remove it for at least a generation – too quickly slips into the background, and then the distance, and then into invisibility. Nobody sees it anymore. Try something less perfect (and less time-consuming). Why not string a poetry washing line across the library or a classroom? Print out a few dozen poems and append them to some wool with clothes pegs. Let students pluck poems from it to read, recite, explore (the Poetry by Heart website is pretty much made for this and has done all the finding for you).

Another example we’ve tried is the ‘poetry crime scene’. If you can bear to do it (and don’t tell me there isn’t a pile of ancient, dusty anthologies somewhere in your school begging for attention) tear some books up and leave fragments, extracts, even whole poems, in a section of your classroom or library. Fling some police tape into the equation, and there’s an instant draw. Maybe ask some keen students to do the work for you (a lot of young people like the idea of tearing up books).

Also think about the very fabric of your school building. Can you turn your school into a poem? Schools often have long strips of compartmentalised windows. Can you stage a competition to write a poem comprising only short words that you can print on A3 paper and display in the windows, so that everyone can read them from outside? Many of these approaches can be incorporated into lessons and schemes of work and so could become an opportunity for all students to engage.

Beware also of the beautiful,  instagrammable book display. For many years I fell victim to this honourable endeavour – so delicious were my book displays and so carefully curated and staged, that

nobody dared extricate a tome from its position, and so they went untouched and the books unread. Heap them somewhere prominent, with a hastily hand-written sign saying ‘free poetry’, and they’ll be picked up, leafed through, and maybe even borrowed.

Let them choose books

Thankfully, we live in a time when the old assumptions about poetry and who writes it are being questioned all the time. We also live in an age where it is possible for anyone to publish and share poetry online. Allow your students the chance to choose what poetry books are stocked on your library or classroom shelves. Share summaries of new publications (the Poetry Book Society is definitely worth joining, and their quarterly bulletin will contain everything you need for this) and get your students to choose which books you should have in stock. If that’s not feasible in your school, set a homework to find a poem online (The Poetry Society has lots of freely accessible poems on its online poems database), print it off and bring it in, where it’s then included in the class’s own, bespoke anthology. Ownership is powerful.

Personalise it

OK, this takes a little more time, but it can have a huge impact. Choose a poem for each of your students that you think they will like. Write their name on the top, or better still, slip it in an envelope. Finish your lesson early and hand out the poems for students to read quietly on their own. Then let them share the choices you’ve made for them with their friends. Or don’t. The fact that you’ve spent time thinking about them and have paired a poem to them as individuals makes them feel valuable, and they may just see a little bit more value in the poem, and the act of reading it, too.

CATHERINE BRUTON MOOD BOARDS

Connect with the atmosphere and emotions of a poem by responding visually.

This activity asks students to make a ‘mood board’: a collage of images, text and ideas that capture the feeling of the poem they’re reading. By prioritising responding to the mood of a poem through the impressions and emotions it evokes, the activity allows students to escape the pressure of analysis and think visually.

You can do this exercise in a computer room, or – if you are feeling particularly brave – you could bring in stacks of old magazines, fabric, colouring pencils, scissors and glue and let students create a glorious poetic mess.

This will work well with poems that appeal to the senses, poems grounded in the concrete –whether that’s place, time, weather, or character. Try some of the reading suggestions in this book or head to poetrysociety.org.uk/education for more recommendations.

Explain to students that they are going to make a ‘Pinterest’ style mood board to create a visual version of the poem. You could get them to work individually or in small groups, allocating a different poem to each group.

Before they start, ask students to read the poem a couple of times then do the following:

• Underline words relating to colour to establish the colour palette.

• Underline words or phrases that appeal to visual senses.

• Find any references to other senses – touch, taste, smell and sound.

• Now ask them to describe the mood of the poem, using descriptive language, perhaps including simile and metaphor.

• Are there any people in the poem? Who is speaking? Who are they speaking to?

• When is the poem set? Where? If the poem doesn’t tell them, try to guess. What do they know about that time or place?

• What is the weather? The time of day? Does it feature any animals? Plants? Jobs? Crafts?

Now get creative, using all the information above, to make a mood board as a visual representation of the poem. Encourage them to think creatively and make imaginative connections. How do you find an image to show mood or tone? How do you represent sound – or smell? Do they want to include words or phrases from the poem in their mood board? Or stick only to pictures?

After they have finished, share the mood boards with the group. If everyone has worked on the same poem, discuss the different ways they have chosen to interpret it. Or if you’ve used different poems, do a ‘mix and match’ exercise where students have to match the mood board to the correct piece of verse.

MAURA DOOLEY FINDING POETRY

Ease students into poetry gently. Take some of the pressure out of writing by exploring ‘found’ poetry.

When you’re starting to use poetry in the classroom you may find that students are initially reluctant. They might have internalised an expectation that poetry will be ‘difficult’ or not for them. The first step in combatting this is to make them feel more comfortable around poetry, exposing them to it gently and easing them into reading and writing it.

Poetry is normal

That’s a message you want them to absorb by osmosis, without forcing them into it. Make poems crop up constantly as something ‘normal’. Have it on the walls of the classroom (contact The Poetry Society for poetry posters) or include it in assemblies. Try beginning and/or ending every lesson by reading a poem, even if the lesson isn’t about poetry at all. Use songs in this way too – read out the lyrics. Before they know it, they’ll have started to accept that poetry is all around them without even questioning it.

Warming up

If you’re planning a writing session, don’t throw your students in at the deep end. Always start with a warm-up exercise to build their confidence and relax them. Give the students an opening – I often use, ‘What I’d really like is…’ – and let them write for two to three minutes. Invite them to read out a favourite line and do so yourself. Or try out one of the quick-fire exercises included in this book. The more your students get used to sharing and celebrating poetry, the less alien it will seem.

Source Material and Found Poetry

‘Found poetry’ is created by selecting words and phrases from other sources and reshaping them into a new text. Think of it as a form of literary collage. This can help ease students into poetry if they are daunted by the blank page. Here are two sources of inspiration for writing poems.

• Newspapers. Collect a selection of headlines from newspapers. Hand them out randomly and use these as starting points for poems. Allow just eight to ten minutes to produce a first draft. Listen to some of the results and then allow time for further editing. If you like the idea of this, move on and use collage. Ask the class to bring in magazines and start collecting them yourself. Prepare two boxes in advance. Fill one with lots of words and phrases cut from magazines and newspapers. In the other box, cut and store all kinds of pictures from magazines and newspapers. Put the students in groups. Give each group a random selection from each box. They are allowed access to the boxes for swapping or adding to what they’ve been given. They have to create a found poem by cutting and pasting snippets. For inspiration, check out the found poems created by young poets on Young Poets Network.

• Postcards. Visual prompts are a great way to loosen students up. Collect postcards (photos or paintings) of people. Spread them out on a table. Ask each student to choose one and write a poem in the voice of the person they have chosen.

CALEB PARKIN HYDROGEN JUKEBOX

Find word-pairs to inspire poems.

A ‘word-hoard’ is an Anglo-Saxon term that refers to a collection of words, or vocabulary, a writer can draw on. We might think of each individual poet as developing their own word-hoard, but equally each class might have a word-hoard, each newspaper, each recipe book etc. A fun way to invigorate a poem is to mix words from different word-hoards. The phrase ‘hydrogen jukebox’, taken from Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, is a brilliant example of two words from different sets of diction colliding.

For this activity, you’ll need paper; scissors; glue sticks; and a selection of magazines, leaflets, trade publications, catalogues, medical textbooks, ancient scrolls – the more varied, the better! Each has its own word-hoard.

The idea is to overcome the blank page, getting started through found poetry; enjoying sound play and silliness; coming up with new ideas for what to write about; discussing word order; thinking about register, diction, specialist banks of language.

Gathering word-pairs

Distribute the publications among the class. Explain what a word-hoard is, and that each publication will have its own word-hoard. Ask the students to choose and cut out words in the publications, focusing primarily on sound (not meaning); which words are delicious to say and look intriguing in print? They should pass publications around so they have access to a diverse range of word-hoards.

Follow these rules while selecting words:

• Cut out no more than two per publication.

• Choose two brand or product names.

• Choose two words that are new to them, or in a foreign language.

• Focus on big headline words, rather than little body copy/paragraph words.

3. Each student should gather an even number of words, 10+ (adapt to your group’s confidence and speed of working).

4. Once they have gathered their words, students shuffle their stash, then pair them up quickly, intuitively, without trying to make sense and without looking. Allow for serendipity!

5. Ask them to share their word-pairs with the group and discuss: which interesting images have appeared? How has one word changed the other? Which collisions of language (eg from a pet shop catalogue alongside a political leaflet) created new, exciting imagery?

Turning word-pairs into poems

Ask students to use one or more of their wordpairs to start a new piece by freewriting (or mind mapping) around what it makes them think of. For more on freewriting, see Malika Booker’s piece, ‘Gathering Your Ingredients’.

They can try Philip Gross’s approach of ‘What if, what then?’ to extend the thought. For example, if their word-pair was ‘Creativity Ultimatum’, they might ask ‘What if there was a “Creativity Ultimatum”? What would happen then?’

Students who’d like a challenge could try using their word-pairs as the first two words of each line of a poem. For an even bigger challenge, they could try using the word-pairs in exactly the order in which they appeared.

Alternatively, create a group poem by asking each student to contribute a line inspired by their word-pairs. Collectively, students should think about the title, and the way the order of the lines affects the piece.

Extending this technique

Found word-pairs can also be a great way to approach topics on the curriculum creatively. Keep a jar of found words available in your classroom.

When starting a new topic or theme – such as the Romantic Poets, or Love and Relationships – ask everyone to think of a certain number of words related to this topic (depending on group size, three to five works well). They should write these words in a list in the middle of their paper. Now ask them to select the same number of found words from the jar at random, quickly pair them and see which interesting imagery arises. How do the word-pairs shed a different light on the keywords the students came up with?

FOYLE YOUNG POETS’ RECOMMENDED READING

We asked some recent winners of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award for their poetry reading recommendations. Here’s what they felt other young poets should be reading. Please be aware that some of these books deal with sensitive content – as teachers, you’ll know best what’s suitable for your students.

Liv Goldreich recommends Ballad of a Happy Immigrant by Leo Boix. Liv says: ‘This collection is a feast of sensations: the poems simmer between languages, landscapes and heritages. The idea of identity is explored kaleidoscopically through innovative forms, deftly examining patrimony, freedom and home.’

Lauren Lisk recommends Flèche by Mary Jean Chan. Lauren says: ‘This collection explores the relationship between mother and daughter, across countries, and cultural divides, and has poignant discussions about sexuality. I found the writing beautifully accessible, and a great way to open my eyes to different cultural experiences.’

Lauren also recommends Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith. Lauren says: ‘This poetry collection is perfect for anyone interested in discussions about race, violence and sexuality. Smith’s strong voice emanates through their various poetic structures, such as the sonnet and free verse. It’s accessible for those new to reading poetry.’

Isaac Meredith recommends The World Doesn’t End by Charles Simic. Isaac says: ‘I recommend this collection for its inventiveness – on every page there is something that will surprise, enchant, or stay in the memory.’

Em Power recommends The Crown Ain’t Worth Much by Hanif Abdurraquib. Em says: ‘Abdurraquib works in conversational tones and stark, intricate images that often meld into one another in interesting ways. I am constantly in awe of his writing.’

Em  also recommends Jay Bernard’s  Surge : ‘Bernard’s command of language is incredible, and the way they weave together poems about the New Cross fire of 1981 and the Grenfell Tower fire is very moving. It’s a hard read, focusing on England’s systemic racism and classism – but it’s also a study of solidarity in the midst of tragedy.’

Jenna Hunt recommends Branches by Rhiannon McGavin. Jenna says: ‘Relatable to an excruciating length, McGavin’s words ripple with the pure joy, dread and protest of teen angst that beautifully turn growing pains into art.’

Anisha Minocha recommends Call Me Ishmael Tonight by Agha Shahid Ali. Anisha says: ‘This collection introduces the form of ghazals, with a brilliant introduction on this beautiful eastern form. The stunning collection is deeply lyrical – grappling the big questions of love, loss and language as well as small beauties.’

Anisha also recommends Fourth Person Singular by Nuar Alsadir. Anisha says: ‘What we think of as poetry is only as complicated as you want it to be, from short lines about feeding caterpillars to more philosophical sketches on art itself, this collection is a journey on shapes of thought.’

Anisha also recommends God at the Door by Tishani Doshi. Anisha says: ‘Doshi fills her words with the sacred, and weaves in some wonderful humour. Through this she explores structures of oppression and offers points, or refuges, of solace in the world around us and each other.’

Anisha also recommends Ultimatum Orangutan by Khairani Barokka. Anisha says: ‘A pressing and necessary collection on the indigenous populations of Indonesia and the climate crisis. Barokka relays the mechanical destruction of habitats, forests and with this, the erasure of a people’s humanity.’

Lydia Wei recommends Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong. Lydia says: ‘It was the first contemporary poetry collection I read, the language was beautiful but still felt accessible to me. It reminds me of a folk song rendered in contemporary verse.’

Nadia Lines recommends War Music by Christopher Logue: ‘ingeniously written, using fantastic and inventive imagery which always blows me away. Logue’s interpretations of the Iliad’s characters are fresh, insightful and often very funny. Whether you have read the Iliad or not, War Music gives the tale modern relevance and highlights the fact that humanity has changed very little in the last 3,800 years.’

Helen Bowell recommends Poems from a Green & Blue Planet, edited by Sabrina Mahfouz. Helen says: ‘New poems sit with old classics in this anthology of nature poems. A Guardian’s Children’s Book of the Year, this is perfect for children and older readers too!’

Tyra Alamu recommends Chrome Valley by Mahogony L. Browne. Tya says: ‘It is an inspiring book for young writers. Browne talks about the

battle and harsh realities of being a Black woman in society, young love and pays tribute to those who came before.’

Olive Franklin recommends Unexhausted Time by Emily Berry. Olive says the collection ‘consolidates Berry’s knack for images that sharpen like a pencil in the eye with a sheer emotional directness. This collection is mature, innovative and bittersweet.’

Dana Collins recommends  Stressed, Unstressed , edited by Jonathan Bate, Paula Byrne, Sophie Ratcliffe, Andrew Schuman. Dana says: ‘ Stressed, Unstressed essentially serves as an anxiety reliever. This collection features some hopeful and peaceful poems to help shut a wandering brain down. My copy is dog-eared and tattered from how much I’ve read it, and I think it has the perfect mix of older poems and contemporary poems.’

There are lots more reading recommendations for young people on The Poetry Society’s website. You could also consult regional writing development organisations, local literary festivals, and local authority school library services for more suggestions.

Part Three Quick-fire Exercises to Generate Ideas

Short, creative activities to equip your students with ways into poetry. Each exercise in this section will generate the kernel of an idea for a poem, which can be worked up into a more extensive piece of writing over time.

This section at a glance:

Poet and multi-disciplinary artist Malika Booker encourages you to gather your poetic ingredients through fact finding, freewriting and figurative language.

Luke Kennard illustrates how to explore multiple perspectives through a single lens. Luke is a poet, novelist and Professor of Creative Writing.

Daljit Nagra considers how to use memory to write descriptively. Daljit is a poet and Professor of Creative Writing.

Poet and Professor of Creative Writing Maura Dooley urges students to let go of their inhibitions and use poetry to ask and answer big questions.

Hannah Lowe shows how generating and constricting word choice can help develop vocabulary and lead to more inventive poetry. Hannah is a poet, memoirist and academic.

Poet and UK Slam Champion Keith Jarrett outlines two approaches to collaborative poems.

Find lots more writing prompts and challenges on The Poetry Society’s online platform for poets aged 5–25, Young Poets Network. Featuring interviews with leading poets, top tips and features about the poetry world, and regular themed challenges, Young Poets Network is free to access and provides year-round encouragement and a supportive community for poets at the start of their writing journey.

Full lesson plans, freely downloadable and written by expert poets and teachers, are available on The Poetry Society’s dedicated online platform for learning resources, Poetryclass. Resources provide for a wide range of age groups and cover many themes, including climate change, science, and identity, as well as literary techniques.

poetrysociety.org.uk/education educationadmin@poetrysociety.org.uk

MALIKA BOOKER

GATHERING YOUR INGREDIENTS: GETTING STARTED

Fact-finding, freewriting and figurative language.

Putting pen to paper can be a formidable prospect for students who may not be used to thinking of themselves as poets. The blank page is a scary place to start, and they need to be encouraged to think creatively and adopt a metaphorical mindset. Happily, there are ways of approaching this that can help them get into the right frame of mind. With writing, as in cooking, we can’t make a start until we’ve done the prep work. Here are some ideas that will enable your students to gather together different poetic ingredients in advance of constructing a poem.

Start by giving your students a topic or choice of topics. This could be: a place, a loved one, a news story, a particular emotion, or another topic of your choosing.

Literal

Ask them to write five literal facts about the topic. These can help anchor the piece of writing or serve as a prompt if they get stuck later. For instance:

• Foxes run amok in the dark.

• Brown brick houses line the roads.

• Only one woman lives in this house.

Or they might note down an often-used quote about the topic if they know one.

Limber up

Explain to your students that writers have to warm up their creative muscles, like athletes before a race. The first exercise is a freewrite, which means you will give them a prompt, and they must respond by writing continuously for three minutes. They shouldn’t worry about craft, structure, or rhetorical devices – the point is to free up their mind and express whatever comes to them in the moment. As the teacher, you will be the ‘pen police’, making sure their pens do not stop.

Give them the prompt ‘I can tell you’ or ‘I cannot tell you’ and these rules:

• the pen must keep moving forward at all times

• do not worry about spelling, grammar or handwriting

• if you get stuck, write the prompt repeatedly until a thought comes to you

• the pen cannot move backward – no crossing out mistakes

• do not worry if you are making sense

• no thinking

• the most important thing is that the pen does not stop moving.

With the chosen topic in mind, tell them to start writing. They have three minutes on the clock. When time is up, ask them to complete their last thoughts and put their pens down. Discuss as a group why this exercise is like a writer’s stretch.

Mining for gold

Now they have some words on the page, they can start to figure out the parts they like. Ask them to re-read their writing and underline any gems. If it’s a group that works well together with high levels of trust between students, you could even ask them to pick out any gems in each other’s work.

When they’ve finished underlining, ask them to list the gems (words, phrases, or sentences) at the bottom of the page. These are the first ingredients gathered towards a poem.

Imagistic language

By now, your students will have gathered some initial thoughts and phrases. The next ingredient to find is the figurative language. To create metaphors and similes, they’ll need to get used to writing expansive descriptions – see also Daljit Nagra’s exercise, ‘Ghost Story’, for another way into this.

Ask them to go back to their chosen topic and think about these questions:

• Weather. What type of weather would their topic be? Be specific and think about the effects the weather might have, eg gale force winds rocking the trees.

• Colour. Which colours do they associate with the topic? What else is that colour? eg redblooded cherries.

• Mood. Even if they’re describing a physical object, think about the atmosphere it conveys, eg an empty library, a fat, hungry bonfire.

• Sound. When they think of their topic, what can they hear? eg a melodic violin, cars honking in summer traffic.

• Food. Are there any foods they associate with their topic? How would they describe the taste? There’s space here to be culture-specific.

• Scent. If they had to shut their eyes and describe their topic using only their sense of smell, what would stand out? eg cut grass in the summer breeze.

• Time of year. How is the season evoked? eg brown leaves trampled on dark evenings.

• Liquid. What type of liquid would their topic be? Can they describe it with an unusual adjective? eg intrepid tea.

• Texture. Which textures can they explore –prickly hedgehog, smooth, soft satin.

Selecting your best bits

Ask your students to underline their best words, phrases, or lines from these ingredients. Use these to write a poem.

A Few Editing Tips

It can be helpful for students to read their lines aloud, perhaps to a partner. Which lines resonate rhythmically? Which are memorable?

Try to find the balance between telling a truth and looking at the subject out of the corner of your eye – which lines gesture at the subject without being too explicit?

Experiment with cutting out words or phrases: can the line stand up without those words? Does the poem lose some effective description, voice, or atmosphere? This will indicate which bits of the poem are truly integral, and which can be stripped away.

LUKE KENNARD LENSES

Focus on one detail as a lens through which you can explore multiple perspectives.

An issue I frequently encounter, particularly when working with writers who are just starting out, is that people need permission to take their lives and experiences seriously; to believe that they may be of interest to a reader.

There’s a long poetic sequence by the American poet Jennifer Knox called ‘Cars’, which is made up of fifteen individual memories throughout her life (perhaps with some exaggeration – we don’t know) to do with driving; to do with the terrible secondhand cars her father bought her; to do with the car accidents she was frequently in and/or caused. It’s a wonderful, confessional and wildly imaginative piece, but the method is so simple and adaptable. There’s also a sequence by Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo, ‘Investigation of Past Shoes’, which does the same thing, but with footwear. Or, perhaps, the most famous example is ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ by Wallace Stevens.

When you look back over your life through a particular lens, something happens: disparate events group together like iron filings to a magnet; the memories automatically become interesting

little vignettes; the anecdotes are transfigured into something more like poetry. This is a fairly simple exercise, but so often leads to some substantial writing.

Spend a few minutes with your class gathering some potential lenses based on personal experience. In a sense, the more mundane the example, the better: haircuts, crushes, train stations, popular music, beds, soft drinks…

Ask each student in the group to provide two of these lenses, and write them on the board. When everyone’s ideas are gathered, ask them to pick one from the board.

Set the students a short time limit to write down three brief episodes from their lives which, in some way, centre around the chosen lens, as quickly and in as much detail as possible. There’s plenty of time to go back over and edit and expand later.

This begins as a short process of generating material, but I’ve had postgraduate students go on to base entire book-length sequences on something that emerged from it.

DALJIT NAGRA

GHOST

STORY

Use memory to write descriptively.

Descriptions are bread and butter for poets. Poetry brings the ordinary world alive through the senses. Guide your students through this exercise, encouraging them to be as original and imaginative as possible in the descriptions they use.

1. Ask your students to imagine they’re a ghost walking through a place they know well, such as their own home, the home of their grandparents or a holiday place they remember well. Remind them to look around the place; they can walk through walls and shrink – they are an amazing ghost!

2. Tell them to select at least five things in that place. These might not be the most obvious things. Consider, for instance, the colour of the light in the hallways, a strange object on the mantelpiece, things to do with a pet, a painting on the wall, a magazine on the floor, and so on.

3. Now, they should describe the things they have selected in terms of the senses – what do these

things look, sound, smell, feel, or even taste like? For example, the creaking stair sounds like a walnut being cracked open. See if they can describe some of the things by using synaesthesia (the mixing of senses). For example, the grainy touch (texture) of the wallpaper (visual) might remind them of the feeling of sand at a particular beach they’ve been to.

While writing, students should remember they’re a ghost and the ghost wants to tell its story: how does that affect their perspective? What does it mean to ‘haunt’ somewhere? How might a ghost’s sense of touch differ from a living person’s? How does a ghost relate the memory of a place to its present?

This technique gets students into the habit of writing descriptively without the clichés – a useful skill that can be applied across their writing.

MAURA DOOLEY

WHO WROTE THIS ONE?

Poetry that asks and answers questions.

From the age of two we begin asking questions with no embarrassment, just curiosity. Where does the sun go at night? Why does a cat have four legs? What is the sea? When did time begin?

Who decided the order of the alphabet? How do we know we’re real and not a dream? As we grow older we grow more guarded in what we feel we can ask and often we become less curious.

Ask everyone in the class to make up a short list of such questions, six is a good number. As the teacher, it is a good idea to have your own list prepared and to be ready to read those out to show the variety and wildness of the questions. Allow two to three minutes to come up with questions. Then mix up all the lists in a box. Everyone then takes one and begins to answer the questions. Allow five to ten minutes for this. After a bit of groaning and ‘who wrote this one!’ (never let anyone own up!), it settles to inventive work.

This exercise is fun but can result in some quite profound poetry. It stretches the mind away from the conventional. Often students come up with fantastical, surreal answers. This unlocks something and leads, in their later poems, to real flights of the imagination.

HANNAH LOWE WORD MAPPING

Develop poetic vocabulary by generating and constricting word choice to make poems more inventive and imaginative.

Here is an exercise I used in writing two of the poems in my first collection, ‘Foxes’ and ‘Seven Card Stud’. This is a great way for students to stretch their poetic muscles by reaching for vocabulary they might not normally think to use.

1. Students begin by choosing a word or short phrase that captures the subject they wish to explore in their poem. It could even be the title they have in mind. They write this in the middle of a blank page.

2. Now, they brainstorm other words and language that are somehow phonetically related – here they might think about full rhymes, half rhyme, assonance, consonance, alliteration. They can be as loose as they want. For example, if they choose the word ‘fox’, they might write: coax, box, locks, fob, hoax, pox, lox, fax, fix, folk, foot.

3. Alternatively, rather than doing the mapping themselves, they could use a tool like an online anagram server. If they type in a phrase, it

will bring up hundreds of anagrams. When I did this using the phrase ‘sevencardstud’, it generated a long list, including crusaded, vents, dancers, duvets, traduces, vends, ventured, ducats, cravens, dusted, caverns, cussed, cursed, dunces, starved, ravens. I noted twenty or so words from the list I felt I might use in a poem.

4. Once students have ‘harnessed’ their words, they should write a first draft of a poem, trying to include as many of these words as possible, seeing where the words take them. Don’t worry if they can only work in a few of them – noone is marking them! When they redraft they might be able to include more of these words.

The benefit of this exercise is that it helps students to grow their vocabulary in a fun way, and also directs their attention to the relationships between individual words in a text, which will come in handy across their English studies.

KEITH JARRETT

COLLABORATIVE GROUP POEMS

Create a collaborative group poem with a common hook.

Collaborating helps students feel less alone. It’s also a way to explore several subjects in one go, or look at one subject in different ways. For this activity, put students in groups of four. We’ll explore two approaches you can take.

Approach A

Ask the students to choose an image, for example an object or a scene, they would all like to write about. Each person in the group will use this image to access a different subject. For example, if they choose dolphins as the common image, one person might explore gender identity, another climate change, another racism, another exam pressure and mental health, another bullying, another citizenship.

Give the students a hook, eg ‘There’s a dolphin’, and ask them to complete the line, focusing on the subject of their choice. They can then join these lines up to create a communal poem.

Person 1: There’s a dolphin surrounded by a circle of shark eyes, being told its flippers are too wavy, its squeal too high-pitched.

Person 2: There’s a dolphin being killed by plastic waste.

Person 3: There’s a dolphin jumping high for the ball, over the shouts of the angry crowd, more concerned with his shade than his skills.

Person 4: There’s a dolphin drowning under the weight of expectation.

If you choose this option, be careful to avoid dangerous stereotypes, and think carefully about which things you put side by side (animal extinction is more serious than exams, for instance, so be creative in how you mix and match themes).

Approach B

Ask the students to pick a theme they all want to write about, eg being in love, family, growing up, caring for the environment. Each student should find a different image as a way to explore that theme. Maybe Person 1 is obsessed with dolphins; Person 2 might use a scarf; Person 3, a toothbrush; Person 4, The Simpsons Again, find a hook, eg ‘My love is’/ ‘No-one tells you that love…’. Now comes the exciting bit: ask the students to tell a story that incorporates their chosen image, using metaphors, similes etc.

Person 1: No one tells you that love is a dolphin trying to escape from the pod, rollerblading through the ocean, jumping through hoops to get noticed.

Person 2: No one tells you that love is a tattered scarf draped over a chair, heartbroken.

Person 3: My love is bristling, in between my teeth, the morning ritual that makes me smile wide.

Person 4: My love is Doh! Is clumsy. Is hopeful.

By working on a poem collaboratively, the group will naturally bond, learn to communicate their ideas and opinions, and explore the things they have in common.

Part Four Extended Writing Activities

Longer activities that will inspire students to write a full poem of their own. Many of the activities in this section explore themes of identity – who are we? where do we come from? how do we feel about the world today?

This section at a glance:

Poet and teacher Kate Clanchy takes a poem written by a former Foyle Young Poet of the Year as a model for poems exploring who we are.

Hannah Lowe suggests using your name as inspiration for a poem. Hannah is a poet, memoirist and academic.

Luke Kennard suggests self-portraits that explore and subvert genre.

Joelle Taylor takes a cinematic approach to storytelling through poetry. Joelle is a poet, performer and facilitator.

Poet and UK Slam Champion Keith Jarrett illustrates ways to approach big ideas, exploring list poems, juxtaposition, and poems based on small details.

Hannah Lowe combines concrete nouns and abstract feelings to create place-based poems.

Poet and Professor of Creative Writing Sinéad Morrissey demonstrates how to use the abecedarian form to write about where we come from.

Young poets have told us that it matters to them to feel they’re writing for a purpose, whether that’s to share their work with friends and family or in the school environment, or to share it with the wider world. Here are some ideas for next steps your students can take once they’ve finished writing and editing their poems:

• Create a display in school or on the school website. Contact The Poetry Society for templates and more ideas.

• Share the students’ poems with family and friends in a school magazine or newsletter. If you’re running a poetry club, keen students could even create a regular school poetry magazine. The Poetry Society has resources to help you get started.

• Encourage students to perform their work in class or in an assembly – the final section contains advice about how to do this.

• Enter your students’ poems into a competition. The Poetry Society’s Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award is an annual competition for poets aged 11–17. Every year, winners receive a fantastic package of prizes, including publication and performance opportunities, and mentoring.

poetrysociety.org.uk/education educationadmin@poetrysociety.org.uk

KATE CLANCHY

I

AM: WE ARE

Let your interests shape your poem.

We’re going to write a poem that explores how our interests shape us. We’ll base the structure of the poem on one written by twelve-year-old Magnus Dixon, who won the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award in 2013 with the poem ‘I am…’, which is about sailing. You can read the full poem on The Poetry Society’s website. Here’s an extract:

I am…

I am Magnus

Who needs the salt spray of waves, the reassuring slap of wake and the controlling shouts of ‘Starboard!’ and ‘Water!’

Who loves the cold push of wind against sail, hull against body, the inquisitive face of the seal and the water’s tingling lapping motion,

Who sees the waves race to the pier, the surge of a gust darkening the liquid turquoise sea; the boat heeling, pushed by the wind’s giant hand,

Who hears the gentle creaking of the boom, the cawing of indignant seagulls chased off a picnic and the rumbling engines of a Peterhead trawler as it leaves port,

Who hates the pungent oil slick on the marina bed, the floating, drifting, plastic bag like a brick wall on a motorway and the absence of the sailor’s deity, the wind,

Who fears the rope’s shadow in his hand will disappear, that the wind might dwindle as if going to sleep and that water will swirl upwards from a jagged hole cut by the rocks that waylay passing ships,

Who dreams of first light’s rays clutching the sea, coating it in golden light; the water surrounding his head forcing its way into his ears and being enclosed by sound, sound, sound,

[…] Dixon.

Read this poem with your class and focus on the images, particularly those that appeal to the senses. Can each student pick out one or two images they like, lines in the poem they can see or hear? Don’t worry about analysing the poem: just sit with it a moment and enjoy it.

Now, your students are going to write their own poems inspired by this one. We’ll borrow the shape of Magnus’s poem: one long sentence with lots of clauses: I am Magnus who needs, who loves….who hopes…

Start by asking your students to think about what makes them passionate. Magnus liked sailing. They might like football, theatre, dance, or reading, or perhaps simply something like chatting to their friends, texting, or cooking. What matters is the way they see it, their vision of it. Once they have identified their interest, students should make a list of the best images that illustrate their passion

– the snapshots in their mind. Which objects do they associate with it? Which smells, tastes and feelings go with their picture? What’s their best memory of it?

For your students’ own poems, begin with a freewrite using these headings, which you can write on the board. Students can write as much or as little as they like. They should keep everything very concrete – appealing to the senses – and real. It will help if everyone writes silently, listening to their own inner voice.

I am [their first name]

Who needs…

Who loves…

Who sees…

Who fears…

Who hates…

Who dreams….

[their family name]

Once they have this draft, students can polish it and write it up. They might do this in a later lesson or for homework – a gap often helps see a poem more clearly. Here are some editing tips:

• Cut away anything that they don’t think works or that seems to strike a false note.

• Beware of fancy long words – definitely don’t add any. Encourage students to keep asking themselves can I see this, hear this, feel this?

• If you’re using a template poem in this way and your students’ poems end up very close to the original, they can write ‘After [name of the original poet]’ under the title. This is a poet’s way of acknowledging the debt.

You could also try making a group version of this poem, asking everyone in the class to contribute their best line. Write it out making the main verb plural ie substitute ‘love/hate/fear’ for ‘loves/ hates/fears’. We are 9 B who love the mountains, who hate bullying… Make a display of your class poem on the wall or perform it at assembly.

HANNAH LOWE

IT’S ALL IN THE

NAME

Your name as inspiration for a poem.

Our names – first names, surnames, maiden names, nicknames – carry all kinds of significance and are a great way into writing about family, identity, history and culture. Many of us have stories about how we came about our names and how we feel about them. These might be about our family names or about the names given to us by our parents.

Ask students to write a poem using their name as a starting point. They might want to do some research into their name to find out more about its origins.

Have a look at Kevin Hart’s ‘My Name’ and Philip Larkin’s ‘Maiden Name’ for inspiration. Find further food for thought in the ‘Your Name is a Poem’ writing challenge on Young Poets Network, which also includes several examples of name poems written by young poets.

One approach to a name poem might be to write an acrostic, which spells a name horizontally in each line of the poem, such as in Lewis Carroll’s ‘A

Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky’ or Simon Armitage’s ‘Floral Tribute’, written to mark the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. Or students could do a freewrite (see Malika Booker’s ‘Gathering Your Ingredients’ exercise for an explanation of how to do this), exploring some of these questions:

Who named you? Where does your name come from? Were you named after someone?

How does your name link to your identity? Does it indicate a past profession? Does it indicate nationality or religion?

How do you feel about your name?

Use the senses to stimulate a poem about your name. You might consider how your name tastes, feels, smells. What colour is your name?

Extension Activity

Can your students write a name poem for a loved one? Perhaps they can illustrate the poem and gift it to the person on a special occasion.

LUKE KENNARD

SELF-PORTRAITS OUT OF CONTEXT

Subvert genre expectations to explore the self.

Playing around with genre can be a creative, original and safe way of writing about identity. Depending on the age group you’re working with, you might need to start by introducing your class to the idea of ‘genre’ – a way of categorising literature by style, form, or content.

Start by asking the group to shout out some genres (romantic comedy, thriller, horror, art house etc) and write these on the board. When you have at least a dozen, come up with some tropes, clichés, devices and general manoeuvres of the genres: the features you’d expect to see in a typical example. For instance, the meet-cute, the troubled past, the long meandering conversation in a single setting; the deus ex machina that conveniently tidies up the plot.

Encourage your students to think critically about what these tropes are and how they work within a text. It’s one thing to recognise them, smirk and feel superior (see the Scream franchise of semi-selfaware horror movies and shows), but how do they function? They might be expedient story shortcuts, emotional short-hand, wish-fulfilment, latent desires and obsessions… What do they say about us as writers and human beings?

Now show the students some poems that take place within distinct genres but somehow subvert these genres. Examples include Bill Manhire’s ‘Out West’, W. H. Auden’s ‘Detective Story’ and Mary Ruefle’s ‘Mariposa and the Doll’. For more examples of subversive fairy-tale poems written by young people, check out the Young Poets Network Fairy-Tale Poetry challenge online.

Spend fifteen minutes reading and discussing these. These poems use the atmosphere, familiar devices and formulae of their chosen genre (Western or cowboy story, crime novel or police procedural, fairy tale). But something is badly

wrong: the pattern is distorted, the narrative that usually provides comfort and escapism has been skewed. The pleasure of reading these poems is very different from the pleasure we might take in reading a novel to pass the time on a long journey. In a sense, it’s the presence of the poet. In another sense, it’s the presence of the reader. One way to read ‘Out West’, is that Manhire’s literally placing himself in the Western genre, encountering its macho tropes and working out, in the poem, how he feels about them. It becomes a critique of a certain kind of rugged masculinity.

Once students have understood the function of genre and explored ways to subvert it, it’s time to write their own poems. Ask each student to select a genre they’re particularly interested in exploring or one that resonates with them, and take the working title: ‘Self Portrait in _____’. (‘Self-Portrait in a Romantic Comedy’ or ‘Self Portrait in a 1980s Action Movie’). Now write a poem developing that concept.

Start by returning to the genre tropes they identified earlier – how will they incorporate them into their poem or subvert them? How do the characters in the poem behave within the constrictions of the genre?

For example, you’re you. But you’re in a horror film. How are you personally going to react to the trappings of the genre? What can you say about yourself, your idealised self, the things you’re most uncomfortable with about yourself, the people you know and love, even, just by reacting to what typically goes on in the world you’ve forced around yourself? How do the tropes address aspects of yourself you might be reluctant to explore explicitly? For instance, in the horror genre, a supernatural antagonist could embody a sense of fear or guilt ‘It is sundown and I, the poltergeist, have hidden my sister’s phone again.’ Allow fifteen minutes for writing a first draft, which can be polished later.

JOELLE TAYLOR

THE WIDE CINEMA OF THE SOUL

Storyboard

I often tell students that poetry is cinema and the pen is a camera, a tool to guide the reader through each scene. To help reinforce that idea, I created this visual exercise. It’s a good way of encouraging distillation of the poem, of finding the precise words to describe a precise feeling or event. I use it most often with groups where the participants need to speak about something important and perhaps issue-based: LGBT identities, racism, the humanitarian crisis.

In this activity, students develop their cinematic thinking and focused writing. They also explore ‘cantos’, small subsections in a longer narrative poem, often linked together by a story arc or metaphor.

An example is Dante’s Divine Comedy.

My own piece about being LGBT, ‘C+nto’, takes a boxing ring as its central metaphor; each canto is a scene from my life story.

Each student should take a sheet of A4 paper and divide it into six boxes, so they make a storyboard or cartoon strip. Ask them to consider the personalpublic issue they want to write about. When they think of it, what scenes come to their mind? These may be actual scenes from their life or more symbolic imaginings.

For example, if thinking about LGBT issues the student might have scenes such as:

• The child alone at the edge of a crowded playing field

• A corridor of whispers

• A slammed door in a changing room

• Older family members turning their backs

• A good friend listening

• The child walking into the centre of a party

On the storyboard they now have six boxes to tell this story, depicting one scene in each box. For learners who might struggle with writing, a good stepping stone could be to draw each scene in the box before moving onto the writing stage. More confident writers can skip that step.

Make it clear that when writing out each scene, the poet must write inside the box (I know, irony) as this helps to focus the poetic brain, to think of one strong metaphor to take the place of six descriptive sentences. They should think about the overall narrative of the storyboard too, the beginning, middle and end; what is the arc? In the example above we have a simple arc from being alone and ashamed to being welcomed by a community, a journey from darkness into the light. The overall journey is as important as each small scene.

Once each box is filled, the student can turn the sequence into a poem, where each box represents a different canto. Encourage them to edit their descriptions and focus on the narrative arc. They could think about breaking the poem’s structure up with scene headings, statistics, quotes, or any other device.

KEITH JARRETT

TACKLING BIG IDEAS

Approach big ideas using list poems, juxtaposition and poems based on small details.

Warm up with this mindful exercise

Poetry and storytelling have similar qualities, and at the root of all stories is a want for something. To warm up, set a timer and ask your students to write a list of ‘wants’ – as many as they can in two minutes. They can do simple, surreal, personal, social, magical… let them go wherever their mind takes them. For example:

I want an end to war I want ice cream I want eight hours sleep tonight!

I want to travel around the world

I want my school to disappear I want my mum to be happy I want to be able to feel safe

I want to feel safe holding hands with my partner in the street

I want chips

I want to grow a pair of wings

I want a time machine

I want everyone to stop talking about unicorns

And so on…

It’s a simple exercise, and students will surprise themselves with the things they come up with. They might find something worrying them doesn’t come up, or they might find it broken down into smaller, related things, eg I want the government to deal with my city’s pollution, I want everyone to have clean water, I want more green space around me. Ask them to highlight or underline the things on their list that take them by surprise.

This is a great way of checking in with the things that matter to them – a useful activity for fostering both creativity and wellbeing.

Improbable connections

Big ideas can be hard to tackle in the classroom but poetry is a great tool for this. This exercise uses juxtaposition to spark creativity, unearthing connections in surprising places.

Once students have warmed up with their ‘list of wants’, ask which big ideas preoccupy them. They may have global concerns: climate change; gender equality; racism, etc. They may have national concerns: social inequality, housing insecurity, nationalism and so on. They may have concerns of their own: uncertainty about the future; uncertainty about the people they love. They could share their concern as a group or they could write it down privately.

Can they think of an object or another topic that’s completely unrelated? Write them both down. For example:

Anger and a dolphin

Someone you love and a toothbrush

How you feel about gender identity and climate change

Now encourage them to think of the similarities and differences between each pair of things.

They’ll find there are some surprising connections between them – the more unusual, the better!

MY ANGER & A DOLPHIN (similarities)

• Rarely seen / Rarely seen

• Disappearing / Endangered

• Buried deep / Usually deep in the ocean

• Is usually a build-up of several smaller things / Usually groups together with other dolphins And so on…

Once they have made these unexpected connections, students can add more detail and formulate them as sentences or lines in a poem. They could create direct metaphors, such as ‘my anger is a dolphin, jumping up when I least expect it’ or use one thing to talk about the other more indirectly.

To take it a step further, create a story-poem. Storytelling can be a key ingredient of poetry making (see Joelle Taylor’s ‘The Wide Cinema of the Soul’ for another way to approach this).

It’s a great way to explore what you feel, without writing what you feel. Once your students have come up with their improbable connections, try using the repetition of ‘imagine’ to create a story poem:

Imagine there’s a dolphin, imagine the dolphin in a blue ocean, imagine the dolphin tied up in an ocean of expectations, imagine the dolphin being told its squeal is too high, its jumps are too wavy, its flippers not rugged enough, its skin not tough, imagine the dolphin being told it’s too weak simply because it’s a dolphin, imagine the dolphin being made to feel like a shark by all the sharp eyes circling it as it swims...

They don’t need to be too obvious about the subject of the poem – if they’ve created a strong enough metaphor, this should shine through.

Seeing the twigs in the woods

Another effective way to approach big ideas is by homing in on the details. Sometimes we need to think small to go big.

1. Ask students to think about which big ideas preoccupy them (see above). If you are doing this exercise alongside the ‘Improbable Connections’ exercise outlined earlier, it could be the same idea, so this becomes a way to extend the thought.

2. Now ask them to picture a moment, a specific scene that encapsulates that idea. Can they

think of ONE thing that happened ONE time? This could be real or imaginary. For example, they might think of fans at a football stadium chanting racist slurs.

3. Ask them to think of a single image that catches the eye within that scene. They should zoom in as close as possible, as if they are using a microscope, eg the blades of grass, bending with the breeze of hateful words.

4. Now encourage them to keep that focus as they add more details: perhaps the same breeze stings the net at the back of the goal; or perhaps they want to stay with the grass, think about how it still grows back, regardless, or bends around the words, anyway. They can take the idea any way they want.

The students don’t need to be explicit about how they feel personally; they should try and get that across through the descriptions they use and what they decide to focus on. Encourage them to use personification as much as possible.

They should keep it short, and avoid referring explicitly to the subject in their poem. If it’s about racism, they shouldn’t use the word racism too much, and definitely not in the title!

If you are doing this exercise as a group, encourage students to share their work with others and discuss how the small things encapsulate their bigger concerns.

Extension activity

If you want to take it further, this added challenge builds on the ‘list of wants’ we used to warm up.

1. Ask your students to think again about a BIG THING they want to tackle.

2. They should revisit the scene they created, using small details to explore the bigger picture. Remember, the scene could be funny, romantic, painful, surreal, eg gossip at a bus stop, a tattered scarf hanging from a hook, offensive stadium chanting, two transwomen holding hands inside a busy chip shop.

3. Now, they should find a character in the scene you’ve imagined. The character doesn’t have to be human, for example, the scarf hanging from a hook.

4. Ask your students to write a list of things the character wants. For example, if they chose the scarf, they might write:

• It wants to be washed

• It wants to be warm

• It wants to feel looked after

• It wants to flutter freely in the breeze

Allow their imaginations and pens to wander freely. There’s no right or wrong. At this stage, they could already mould a poem out of this list by adding more detail, using what they know about the subject or doing more research online.

The scarf wants to be washed with all the other scarves tangling up with each other.

It wants to flutter freely in the breeze almost taking flight.

These exercises allow you to tackle big ideas without too direct a spotlight, using creativity as an outlet that encourages wellbeing and self-expression.

HANNAH LOWE

THE LIBRARY OF HAPPINESS

Create a poem by marrying an abstract emotion with a physical place.

One of the traps young poets can sometimes fall into is the idea that they need to write poetry about abstract notions – things like love, hope, freedom. This can have the effect of alienating the reader, who has nothing concrete to latch onto. This exercise is a useful way to ground the abstract in a concrete, physical sense of place, leading to detailed, sensory poems that are a joy to read.

As a class, brainstorm different emotional states –these can be anything from sadness, excitement, or anticipation, to hopelessness, happiness etc. Ask each student to choose one of these emotional states to focus on.

The students should imagine that their chosen emotional state is a physical place. Get them to answer the following questions:

• What colour is it?

• What does it smell of?

• What does it taste of?

• What time is it there? (eg Happiness is always midday),

• What animal lives there, if any?

• What can you hear?

Now, ask each student to write down a real, physical place on a slip of paper. These can be anything, eg swimming pool, café, library, cupboard, kitchen. It should be an identifiable physical space, not branded (eg not Ikea, but furniture shop would be fine), and not too general (eg house is too general, kitchen is fine).

Put all the slips in a hat (or similar receptacle). Each student chooses one at random – hopefully not their own. They should now blend this with their chosen emotional state to find a title and theme for their poem. For example, The Kitchen of Anticipation, The Library of Sadness, The Café of Hopelessness.

Finally, they should draft a poem describing this place, drawing on the answers they came up with earlier. and adding imagery and descriptive language as they go. For example ‘The Library of Happiness is yellow as the yolk of a freshly cracked egg. It is noon in the Library of Happiness and the cuckoo clocks are singing in the summer.’

If they’re struggling to find a structure for their poem, consider using this exercise in conjunction with Sinéad Morrissey’s ‘The Abecedarian’.

SINÉAD MORRISSEY

THE ABECEDARIAN

Use the alphabet to explore where you grew up.

An easy way to get writing is to go back to the beginning: the alphabet. ABC is one of the first things we learn by heart. An abecedarian poem is a poem structured around the sequence of the alphabet. It’s an easy form for students to grasp but can also illuminate aspects of a subject they might not have considered.

The word ‘abecedarian’ can mean ‘a person learning the rudiments of something’, such as space travel, botany, France. But you can also use the alphabet to write a poem on any given subject, in fascinating, specific detail – that subject could even be yourself!

In her poem, ‘Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation’,1 Mojave American poet Nathalie Diaz lists, very powerfully, the details of where she grew up:

Angels don’t come to the reservation. Bats maybe, or owls, boxy mottled things. Coyotes, too. They all mean the same thing –death. And death eats angels I guess, because I haven’t seen an angel fly over this valley ever...

As you can see, each line begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. Diaz’s abecedarian contrasts what might be easy, conventional imagery with what is real, in her own experience. As such, it’s a kind of speaking back to, or against, expectations. All of us are authorities on what is personal to us: the houses we grew up in, the streets where we played, our Reception classrooms. Ask your students to

write an abecedarian on where they grew up. They should start by writing out the alphabet down the left of the page. Then list three or four concrete nouns that represent where they grew up, eg chip shop, swings, allotment. Which nouns do they want to make sure appear in the poem and how will the rest of the text work around those? Which verbs will they use and how will they affect the mood of the poem, eg ‘rush, devour’ make for a much busier poem than ‘wonder, doze’. Consider the journey of the poem: what point are they trying to make as they move from A to Z? What ‘A’-word will they start with? What ‘Z’-word will they work towards? And what story will they tell in between?

Their abecedarian will come entirely out of their own expertise, a unique encapsulation of their identity. Even better, it will be full of concrete nouns – real things in real places – which always helps make poems vivid and exciting to the reader. Besides writing about where they grew up, other topics that lend themselves to this form include hobbies, holidays, the environment – anything with a strong sense of place.

It can be helpful to tackle the trickier letters first!

Consider using this exercise alongside Hannah Lowe’s ‘The Library of Happiness’ to inspire more place-based poetry.

1. Natalie Diaz, ‘Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation’, When My Brother was an Aztec (London: Faber & Faber; Main ed., 2021. US edition: Copper Canyon Press, 2012.)

Part Five Perform Poetry

Performing is one way students can showcase their work to friends, family and peers, or even on a national stage. This instils a sense of pride in their poems, boosts their confidence and helps bring poetry alive across the school.

This section at a glance:

Poet and multi-disciplinary artist Malika Booker offers advice about how to script a poem in preparation for a performance.

Joelle Taylor outlines her top tips for preparing for a performance. Joelle is a poet, performer and facilitator.

Writer, facilitator and education consultant Alison Powell explains how to use the memory palace technique to learn a poem by heart.

To help inspire your students, find lots of videos of poets reading their work on The Poetry Society’s YouTube channel. And if you’re thinking of running a spoken word scheme in your school, The Poetry Society has a toolkit for teachers, packed with lots more advice. Contact us for more details.

If you’re based in England and your students are interested in learning a poem by heart and performing it, check out Poetry by Heart, a national poetry speaking competition for students in Key Stages 2–5.

Think about organising a poetry performance to coincide with National Poetry Day, which takes place every October in the UK.

poetrysociety.org.uk/education poetrybyheart.org.uk

nationalpoetryday.co.uk educationadmin@poetrysociety.org.uk

MALIKA BOOKER

SCRIPTING THE POEM FOR PERFORMANCE

Script the poem to prepare for performance.

When students are getting ready to perform poems, it can be helpful to mark up a script in advance. This eliminates nerves and encourages confidence, giving students a tool to go from poet to performer.

How to turn a poem into a script

• Type up the poem double-spaced in 14 point.

• Pauses. Get students to read through their poem and mark up the pauses using dashes or forward slashes. They should differentiate between long and short pauses, perhaps by using different colours or different length dashes.

• Enunciation. In a poem, mispronouncing vital words causes audiences to miss entire meanings within a section of text. Ask students to underline the truly vital words in the poem, and encourage them to ask for help if they’re unsure about pronunciation.

• Tone. A single poem can have many shifts in tone and voice. On the next reading of the poem, draw a line across the page each time the tone shifts. Students could even add emojis in the margin to remind them which tone is coming up.

• Gesture. Ask students to identify one or two spaces in the text where they can enhance a performance using their hands, facial expressions, feet or body.

• Stage Directions. Encourage students to picture scenarios they are familiar with, in order to access the emotions of the poem. They can annotate the poem with these scenarios in the margin. For example, if it’s an angry poem they might write ‘as if my brother has made me really mad’, or if it’s a poem exploring guilt, they could write ‘as if I am in trouble with my mum’. This can be a way of making a complex text more accessible and pulling the right emotions out of a performer.

• Group Work. As well as solo delivery, performing a poem as group can be incredibly powerful, and allows students to offer one another feedback and positive reinforcement. Ask your students to work in groups of around four, selecting a poem that appeals to them all. When they are devising their performance, they should think about: how to divide the poem between different speakers to highlight contrasts or internal dialogues in the text; can they deliver lines in unison or in ‘canon’ (where they stagger their start times)?; how can they use gesture or movement to mirror or otherwise engage with the imagery and emotions of the poem?; can they each perform the same poem in radically different ways? This can bring out some interesting conversations and encourage collaboration.

Extending the activity

Follow this activity with a discussion about changes from page to stage. Consider the following questions:

How is the poem structured on the page (line breaks, stanza breaks), and how can this structure be represented in performance?

How does performing a poem bring out the sound of the text differently? Think especially about rhythm, rhyme and features like alliteration and assonance.

As an audience watching a live poem, how is our understanding of a poem different from when we read it on a page? Is there as much room for interpretation?

HOW TO PERFORM A POEM

Increase confidence by performing poems.

Performing a poem allows the poet to communicate directly with an audience, to break down the fourth wall between writers and readership. It allows the poet to bypass literary gatekeepers in seeking a greater audience for their work, and it can have a profound effect on a young person when they feel heard for the first time. Confidence increases, focus sharpens, and self-esteem is raised. And it not only impacts the young poet but also the wider school community around them. It creates connection.

Spoken word poetry performance is not acting. It is remembering. By that, I mean that the poet on stage inhabits their work completely, returning to the passion with which piece was written, the reason behind its writing. In spoken word culture, authenticity is as important as being skilled in delivery, sometimes more so.

Having said that, there are basic exercises young poets can practise in order to deliver their work with more energy, focus and passion.

Learn the poem

(See also, Alison Powell’s piece, ‘Poetry by Heart’, for more ideas.) This is basic but vital. It is also the last thing a student will want to do, which is a natural response.

Repetition is the most effective technique, and to make this less of a grim task, the best way I have found to do this is to pair students up. Pairs sit facing each other and begin by memorising the first two lines of each poem, taking it in turns to say them. Increase to four lines, including the first two. Then to six, then eight etc – until the whole poem is learned. The non-speaking partner prompts where lines are forgotten.

Other memorisation aids include using body prompts for each line, eg small gestures like raising a hand, clicking a finger, that remind the mouth what the line is; or recording the poem on a phone and playing it back though headphones, joining in with as many lines as possible until the whole piece is memorised.

Once the poem is learned the work really begins. It can be a daunting journey from introverted poet to confident stage performer, but it is shorter than most people think. The art of performance is essentially the art of impersonating yourself.

Mark the script

(See also, Malika Booker’s ‘Scripting the Poem for Performance’ for more tips.)

Ask students to note the moments in the poem that need emphasis, the emotional journey of the piece. They should think about:

• What happens to their voice during those moments? Is it quieter, louder, faster?

• How does the use of their voice enhance the poem?

• How does their body react to the poem?

Remember that ‘expressive’ does not necessarily equate to waving arms around and shouting. Some of the most powerful pieces are spoken quietly and in stillness. Stillness and silence are a part of their performance toolkit.

Perform the poem without speaking

To involve the body more, a good exercise is to have students perform their poem without speaking, so that they use their faces and their bodies to communicate the arc of the poem, the moments within it. With what part of the body is their poem being told? Is it the eyes? The hands?

Class work

If a young poet is finding it difficult to relax into the poem, try the following exercise with the class. It takes them way from the immediate stress, relaxes them and reminds them that all performance is rooted in play. The whole class participates at the same time, which is helpful if a student is anxious or shy.

Ask the class to repeat their poems as loudly as they can to themselves or to the nearest wall. Ask them to try to be louder than anyone else in the room. The result is glorious chaos and laughter, the first step into relaxing into performance. Next, ask them to say the poem out loud again but tell them that this time, you will shout a movie genre out: horror, romantic, action, film noir, etc. As soon as you do everyone must recite the poem in that genre.

Finally, ask them to return to the poem on their own – more relaxed, physically warmed up and, since the entire class had just embarrassed themselves, a little less worried about what others might think. Performance is an exceptional aid to developing community and networks of friendships, and it leads each poet straight back to their self with a renewed sense of confidence.

ALISON POWELL

POETRY BY HEART

Make a memory palace to learn a poem by heart.

Learning a poem by heart is a wonderful way to inhabit the poem, to lift it off the page and form a special relationship with it by committing it to memory. If you’re based in England, check out the Poetry By Heart programme, a national poetry speaking competition that is all about finding the joy in poetry by encouraging students to connect with poems in this way.

There is no definitive way to learn a poem. The way you remember things will be different to the way other people remember things. Your memories might be full of colour, while someone else will vividly recall sounds. You might like lists while someone else prefers pictures. One thing the best memorisers agree on, though, is that the more pathways you make for your memory, the better your recall will be.

The livelier and more enjoyable a student’s experience of committing to memory, the more likely they are to remember their poem by heart. The memory palace technique is a mnemonic strategy that helps bring the memorisation process to life.

Make a memory palace

When you make a memory palace, you commit to a process of associating particular nuggets of information with different rooms in an imagined place. Building a memory palace is a creative process. With practice, it can be extremely effective.

To build your memory palace, start with a building you know well. It could be your house or flat now, a place you used to live, or a place where someone you know lives. Alternatively you could use your school or college. What’s important is that it’s a place you know so well you can imagine walking around the building.

With the memory palace technique, you use this building as a scaffold on which to hang the things you want to remember, following a set path. For example, you might recall a complete list of Shakespeare’s plays by making an association between each title and part of a room, like this:

• Two Gentlemen of Verona – I imagine there are two men fighting in the middle of my bedroom. They are shouting in Italian and wearing tall hats. This makes me think of Verona. (Your associations are personal – they do not have to be logical!)

• The Taming of the Shrew – Next I walk to my wardrobe and there, curled up in my winter jumpers is a shrew. It lets me stroke its head because it is tame.

• Henry VI Parts 2, 3 and 1 – Beside the wardrobe is a chair and I imagine a six-year-old Prince Harry sitting there trying to count to three. He keeps getting the numbers mixed up.

• Richard III – Next to the window, on the chest of drawers, I imagine three men I know who are all called Richard.

Using this technique to remember a poem

To use this with a poem, make connections between the images in each line and the parts of the building you’ve chosen as your memory palace. Make them strange, funny, silly or rude (it’s your imagination, so the good news is, you don’t have to share the details of your memory palace with anyone!) and, most importantly vivid.

Here’s an example of a memory palace that I created for the opening of the poem ‘Elegy’ by Chidiock Tichborne

Elegy (1586)

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares; My feast of joy is but a dish of pain, My crop of corn is but a field of tares, And all my good is but vain hope of gain: The day is past, and yet I saw no sun, And now I live, and now my life is done.

This poem is three stanzas long, so I used one room of my memory palace for each stanza. Using my childhood home, I use the dining room for the first stanza because of the reference to a feast.

Then I attach the images from each line. So, for this stanza, I might have:

• ‘My prime of youth is but a frost of cares’. There’s a version of my younger self, wearing a number 1 T-shirt in the corner of the dining room, and that part of the room is frosty.

• ‘My feast of joy is but a dish of pain’. I imagine moving to the dining table for the feast with its dish of glass and splinters.

• ‘My crop of corn is but a field of tares’. I imagine that my mouth magically heals as I push away from the table and move to the window. Through it, I see a vibrant crop of corn. I notice how it moves in the sunlight. I see a giant hand

reach in and tear it all up (this is of course, not the literal meaning of tares, but homophones can be helpful when memorising!). I see the golden crop replaced with grass.

• ‘And all my good is but vain hope of gain’. I move to the left hand corner of the room and imagine a huge stack of certificates and trophies on a cabinet. This is ‘And all my good’. In this part of my dining room there is a mirror, so I imagine looking into it and seeing myself acting vain, maybe doing my hair, admiring my reflection saying ‘is but vain hope of gain’.

• ‘The day is past, and yet I saw no sun’. I imagine the room becoming suddenly very dark, and the moon shining in through the window. A clock strikes midnight.

• Finally I imagine skipping towards the doorway and singing ‘And now I live’ and then I imagine collapsing in a melodramatic death in the doorway with ‘and now my life is done.’

Then imagine walking to the next room ready for the next verse.

The key to making a memory palace effective is to walk through it in your imagination repeatedly, making your images bigger, brighter, tastier, louder until it feels real and natural.

WHAT NEXT?

The Opening Line brings together the expertise and ideas of a range of experienced poets, educators and young people, with a view to empowering teachers to use poetry in the classroom. We hope you have found the ideas explored here inspiring and that you continue to refer to this book in years to come. This compendium is, however, only an opener. Caroline Bird remarks that ‘you don’t need to be a professional poet to conjure brilliant poems out of other people.’ Indeed, there are many more ways to embed poetry in your school beyond what is covered in these pages; as teachers, you already have the skills you need to do just this. We encourage you to follow your instincts and harness your own imagination, trusting that in doing so you will model for your students the creativity and openness that spark their poetic potential.

The Poetry Society is committed to supporting you and your students at every step of your poetry journey. Please do stay in touch with us: send

your students’ poems to our competitions, tell us which new resources or CPD opportunities you’d like to see, and suggest any other ways we can work with you to keep young people writing and enjoying poetry. You’ll find details about some of the other opportunities we offer on the next page, and on Young Poets Network we maintain a list of competitions and development opportunities offered by arts organisations across the UK.

The effort to champion poetry in education is needed now more than ever. We know that there are thousands of passionate teachers out there doing that work every day, and that no part of this effort can take place in isolation. The Poetry Society is keen to hear about your experience fostering poetry in your school and would love to help you share those ideas with other educators. Join our poetteacher network, Cloud Chamber, to be part of the conversation. Consider this book an opening line – over to you.

FURTHER POETRY OPPORTUNITIES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND SCHOOLS

The Poetry Society is committed to providing young people and schools with access to poetry opportunities.

For Young People

The Poetry Society’s Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award is one of the most prestigious poetry competitions for young people aged 11–17 in the world. It has shaped the careers of many of our best-loved poets writing today. Running annually, the competition accepts poems on any subject and in any form. Winners receive amazing prizes, including mentoring and talent development opportunities.

Young people who enjoy creative writing should check out Young Poets Network, The Poetry Society’s free online platform for poets up to the age of 25 worldwide. It’s for everyone interested in poets and poetry – whether they’ve just started out or they’re a seasoned reader and writer. There are inspiring features, challenges, and competitions, as well as new writing from young poets, and advice and guidance from the rising and established stars of the poetry scene.

Aspiring writers and poetry enthusiasts aged 11–18 can also purchase Poetry Society Youth Membership. Young members receive poetry goodies, discounts towards opportunities for feedback, The Poetry Society’s newspaper Poetry News, and other benefits.

For Schools

School membership connects your school with all that poetry has to offer. School members receive books, resource, posters, Poetry News and our internationally acclaimed quarterly poetry magazine The Poetry Review (secondary only). Schools also have access to our Poets in Schools service and to regular online CPD sessions via our poet-teacher network, Cloud Chamber

Poetryclass teaching resources, lesson plans, and activities, covering all ages and exploring many themes and forms of poetry, are easy to search and free to download. Each resource has been created by our team of poet-educators and teachers, with hands-on experience of developing an enthusiasm for poetry in the classroom.

Poets in Schools help develop an understanding of and enthusiasm for poetry across all ages. The Poetry Society arranges for poets to visit schools and deliver one-off workshops, long-term residencies, INSET sessions for staff, and poet-led assemblies. Online and in-person options are available.

Sign up to our schools e-bulletin by emailing educationadmin@poetrysociety.org.uk poetrysociety.org.uk/education

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist and publisher. His second collection, After the Formalities, was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize and his third collection, Heritage Aesthetics, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2023. He is artistic director of Out-Spoken Press.

Caroline Bird is a poet and playwright. Her sixth collection, The Air Year, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020 and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize and the Costa Prize. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award.

Malika Booker is a British writer of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage. Her first collection, Pepper Seed, was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas 2014 Poetry Prize and in 2020 she won the Forward Prize for best single poem. She cofounded the poetry collective Malika’s Kitchen. In 2019 she received a Cholmondeley Award for her outstanding contribution to poetry.

Catherine Bruton juggles life as an English and Drama teacher and an award-winning children’s author of books including No Ballet Shoes in Syria. She was a Poetry Society Teacher Trailblazer in 2022.

Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her work has won a Forward Prize, the BBC National Short Story Award, the Orwell Prize and the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize. In 2018 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature, and an anthology of her students’ work, England: Poems from a School, was published to great acclaim. How to Grow Your Own Poem (Swift Press) is popular with both teachers and beginning poets.

Maura Dooley has published six poetry collections and has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize. She is Professor Emerita of Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she directed the MA in Creative and Life Writing. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Gareth Ellis is a school librarian working in North East England. His poetry has been published in Butcher’s Dog magazine. In school, he runs creative writing groups, poetry events, visits from poets and Poetry by Heart. He is passionate about bringing poetry to as wide an audience as possible and he firmly believe poetry belongs to everyone.

Lauren Hollingsworth-Smith is a writer and artist based in Rotherham and Oxford. Her debut pamphlet, Ugly Bird, won the 2020 New Poets Prize. Her first full-length collection, Look How Alive, was published by WriteBloody UK in 2022. Lauren was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2019.

Keith Jarrett is a writer, performer and educator. A multiple poetry slam champion, he was selected for the International Literary Showcase as one of 10 outstanding LGBT UK-based writers. Keith teaches at NYU London and works as a freelance educator in secondary schools.

Luke Kennard is a poet and novelist whose sixth collection, Notes on the Sonnets, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2021. He lectures in English and Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham.

Hannah Lowe is a poet, memoirist and academic. Her latest book, The Kids, won the Costa Book of the Year 2021. Her first poetry collection Chick (Bloodaxe, 2013) won the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection. She is a Reader in Creative Writing at Brunel University.

Sinéad Morrissey is the author of six poetry collections. Her awards include the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Daljit Nagra was born to farming parents who came from India. He was born and grew up in West London then in Sheffield where his parents ran a corner shop. He is Professor of Creative writing and was Chair of the Royal Society of Literature 2021–25. He has published four books of poetry, with Faber & Faber.

Caleb Parkin has published three pamphlets and two full collections. He tutors for The Poetry Society, Poetry School, Cheltenham Festivals, First Story, Arvon, and holds an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes (CWTP). He is a practice-as-research PhD candidate at University of Exeter, as part of RENEW Biodiversity.

Alison Powell is a writer and educator with twenty years’ experience in the secondary English classroom. She has worked on education projects for BBC Bitesize, Poetry By Heart, and Cambridge University, among others. Her creative work has been published widely and she offers writing workshops through her venture WriteClub.

Jasmine Simms was a commended Foyle Young Poet in 2012. Her debut pamphlet, Like Horses, was published by Smith/Doorstop in 2019. Jasmine has won awards including the New North Poet Award and Yorkshire New Poet Prize. She is Co-Director of the Dead [Women] Poets Society.

Joelle Taylor is the author of five collections of poetry. Her fourth, C+NTO & Othered Poems, won the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry,and the Polari Best LGBT Book Award 2022. She is the co-curator and host of Out-Spoken, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

We are grateful to the ever-growing community of Foyle Young Poets and alumni of the programme, whose advice and recommendations have helped shape this compendium. Particular thanks to those who provided recommendations for the Read Creatively section: Tyra Alamu, Helen Bowell, Dana Collins, Olive Franklin, Liv Goldreich, Jenna Hunt, Nadia Lines, Lauren Lisk, Isaac Meredith, Anisha Minocha, Em Power, and Lydia Wei.

Celebrating 25 Years of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award

The Poetry Society’s Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award has been encouraging and supporting young poets for almost three decades. Since the annual competition was established, it has inspired tens of thousands of writers aged 11–17 to write poetry. Often, their journey into creative writing begins in the classroom. Alongside our talent development work supporting young poets, The Poetry Society has always been committed to supporting teachers, librarians and poeteducators to create a classroom in which poetry thrives.

The Opening Line is a compendium of poetry reading, writing and performing activities educators can use when working with young poets. It brings together expertise from experienced poets and teachers, as well as recommendations from former winners of the Foyle Young Poets Award. In these pages, there are reflective pieces that help you get into a poetic mindset, quick-fire activities to find that initial spark, longer exercises to deepen students’ writing practice, tips for approaching reading creatively and curiously, and ideas for bringing out the best in poetry performance.

If your students are keen poets, encourage them to explore The Poetry Society’s free resources and talent development programmes, the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award and Young Poets Network. You will also find lots more support for teachers, including CPD and teaching resources at poetrysociety.org.uk/education