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"Poetry helps children make sense of their world" - do you agree?

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MumsnetGuestBlogs · 03/10/2013 14:55

Poetry has fallen out of favour. Children tend to come across it almost entirely through the dreaded comprehension homework - and I think too that some booksellers, teachers and librarians can be a little bit scared of it. But like superhero movies, it is coming back. Michael Gove (love him or hate him) is introducing more poetry into the curriculum.

I’d like to convince you that our children will gain from this. From next September all children in primary school will learn poems by heart. Having a store of poems, children will grow up with a little juke-box of wondrous words inside their head, which will be there to console them as they lurch into adolescence and all the strong emotions that the state can bring.

Tom Hiddleston, who reads on The Love Book app, puts it thus: “I think poetry as a form is about the that simplest literature can get… all of the trimmings have been stripped away, and really great poets have got to the heart of the matter by using very, very few, brilliant words, to make you feel something, which, for most people, is inexpressible. So the size of their love, the loudness of it, the intensity of it; most people feel it coursing through their body - but only a very few people have been able to set it down in verbal form, that somehow gets close to what it feels like.”

The idea for The Love Book app grew out of the slightly surprising success of the first app I co-created, iF Poems. iF Poems’ aim was to introduce children to the joys of poetry through an interactive app, with poems read by actors they might like, such as Helena Bonham Carter, whom they knew as Bellatrix Lestrange in Harry Potter, or as the mad toddler-tantrum-throwing Red Queen in Tim Burton’s Alice; or Tom Hiddleston, who plays the scene-stealing anti-hero Loki in the The Avengers films.

I decided this new app would be specifically about love - an app for adolescents, and adults too. There is a poem on it by John Clare called ‘First Love’ which beautifully expresses the feeling of falling in love for the first time. The line ‘blood burnt around my heart’ takes me right back to the confusion of my sixteen-year-old, overwhelmed self, which was reassured by the poet’s genius with words - and by the universality of what I was feeling. There is, I think, something about poetry which helps to crystallise emotion, and I found this terribly comforting as a teenager – it helped me to make sense of the flood of feelings I felt - perhaps, even, to contain them. I wanted today’s teens to have this option too.

Perhaps they might also draw from their stock of words a sticking plaster - another section of The Love Book app deals with when love is thwarted, or when it’s over. I imagine the user of the app stealing a line to help with these desperate moments – perhaps the two-line poem by George MacDonald, which says simply, “Come home.”

So far, things are going well. The we posted of Tom Hiddleston reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?) has had 35,000 hits in a week, and seems to be reaching people who had previously written off Shakespeare as ‘that dull class at school’.

National Poetry Day’s director, Susannah Herbert says “It’s like having a little Cyrano de Bergerac on permanent standby in the palm of your hand.”

Try it! From John Fuller’s ‘Valentine’: “I’d like to find you in the shower/And chase the soap for half an hour” or “I’d like to find a good excuse/To call on you and find you in./I’d like to put my hand beneath your chin,/And see you grin.”

Think the anti-superhero Loki could even win over Bellatrix with that line.

Do you read poetry - either to your children, or by yourself? Is it a good thing for children to learn poetry 'by heart'? Tell us what you think on the thread.

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sleepingdragons · 05/06/2018 09:04

Poetry is one of those things that's often really badly taught IMO.

One of my primary teachers was married to a poet and very influenced by him. We did poetry all the time, but that didn't mean reading poems we didn't understand and having to do exercises on them.

That meant writing poetry. It really made us think about language and the construction of sentences in a creative way. The school gave us inspiring experiences to write poems about - after trips to art galleries we'd be encouraged to write poems about the art we'd seen. Or we'd listen to music and write poems about what we imagined.

I've still got some of the collections of poems we wrote as kids, and some of them are pretty good.

It was a playful and empowering approach to learning to use our own language with confidence. I don't think it's any coincidence that several children from my class have gone on to have successful careers in the arts.

Then I went to secondary, and "poetry" was something you were forced to do - reading dry poems we didn't understand but which were officially "great" (whether we thought so or not was irrelevant), learning them and completing exercises where there was a right or wrong answer.

So, I totally get why people don't like poetry, but I put that down to poor teaching and choice of poems.