Heads up! It's poetry season

Image from cover of 'Inside Out' ed JonArno Lawson (Walker Books)

Booktrust's Anna McKerrow writes about a range of opportunities for exploring poetry in the classroom, including the T S Eliot Prize Shadowing Scheme

Heads up! It’s poetry season. After the Forward Prize announcement on the 1st October, National Poetry Day on 4th October, and the gently ululating poetic ripples resonating from the Cultural Olympiad’s Poetry Parnassus, it’s now time for another Mexican wave in appreciation of lyric, imagery-rich, extended metaphor-ed or jubilantly sparse language.

Every year the Poetry Book Society awards the T S Eliot Prize for Poetry. Ten collections of poetry are shortlisted for the prize, and this year the shortlist will be announced on 23rd October.

The subject of this post, however, is the Shadowing Scheme, which starts on 25 October and is run in partnership with the English and Media Centre’s e-magazine, enabling A Level students to take part in shadowing the judges of this year’s prize to select the poet they think should win, before the judges’ decision in January.

Students or teachers can download two poems from each of the shortlisted collections from the Poetry Book Society website along with some brief biographical notes for each poet. Teachers who are exploring the poems with students can also take advantage of a teachers’ guide which is available from the English and Media Centre’s e-magazine website.

A Level (or equivalent) students can either enter write a 500 word rationale for why their chosen poet should win or take part in an online student poll, contributing to the judging process. The standard is high: last year’s winner of the writing competition, Liam O’Brian from East Barnet School, wrote the following sensitive appreciation of Carol Ann Duffy’s war poem 'Last Post':

We now live in a time where the ‘undo’ button on our word processor means no more mistakes. The ‘trash’ folder in our email client means nothing is ever lost. The ‘rewind’ key on our remote control means that the story need never end. Carol Ann Duffy explores the idea of reversing the march of thousands of young recruits to their death. The result is euphorically devastating: ‘you get up, amazed...and all those thousands dead/are shaking dried mud from their hair... your several million lives still possible’. Unfortunately, she must remind us that this was not the case: ‘If poetry could truly tell it backwards,/then it would’.

We hear a lot about the supposedly dire position of poetry in schools – kids think it’s boring, teachers are intimidated by it – but projects such as this reveal a real engagement with new poetic work. It’s not just this – the Foyle Young Poets receives thousands of entries every year; The Poetry Society’s SLAMbassadors online slam poetry competition is hugely popular and in its 10th year; children throughout the country work with poets in schools every month via literature development agencies such as New Writing South, NAWE and The Writers Centre Norwich to name a few.

There’s a lot of free support out there for teachers too. Sites such as The Poetry Station and The Poetry Archive showcase video and audio footage of poets performing their own work, and The Poetry Archive, Perform A Poem as well as The Poetry Society’s Poetryclass site feature tons of free lesson plans and resources for making poetry come alive.

For the teachers among you looking for a way to enliven poetry in the classroom for A Level students, the shadowing scheme is a great activity to get involved in. There are some wonderful prizes to be won, including tickets to see the award ceremony in January and a full set of the shortlisted books – which no poetry geek should be without (I’ll definitely be adding them to my wishlist). The winning rationale also gets published in the English and Media Centre’s e-magazine.

The Scheme should also appeal to those pragmatic 17- and 18- year-olds who are looking for some extra pizzazz for their UCAS application, young poets or indeed any teens you think would enjoy engaging with new contemporary poetry.

It seems to me that rather than wallowing in a epically anti-poetry landscape, we in the UK benefit from a variety of celebrations of and interactions with lovely, thought-provoking words. So, teachers – get involved, and the rest of us – be heartened. I hope Liam would describe the current poetry scene, especially for young people, as 'euphorically vibrant'. It seems like something he would say.