Teaching PoetryThe range of poetry accessible to younger children and to the whole ability range in
secondary schools expanded considerably in the 1980s. Writers such as Michael Rosen,
Gareth Owen, Roger McGough, Allan Ahlberg, Grace Nichols, John Agard and Shel
Silverstein were widely read in schools. Often their themes are close to children’s own
daily lives at home or school. It was perhaps inevitable that in the enthusiasm for these
newer voices there was some neglect of poets from earlier ages. The balance may have
been restored, so that students now may enjoy an immense diversity of work, from poets
such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, to Walter de la Mare and Eleanor Farjeon, and
to some of the most impressive writers of the present such as Ted Hughes and Charles
Causley.
The newer, often comic voices were invaluable in giving an impetus to a revival in
poetry teaching; and in disabusing students of the notion that poems are invariably
sentimental in thought or remote in language. There has also been an increased
awareness of how different kinds of poems ask to be read, from the narrative of a ballad
to the compressed thought of a sonnet. Some poems require that readers walk about
inside and around them, as it were, considering the words from different angles much as
they might walk around a sculpture, seeing how the light falls. Other poems, where
story predominates, invite a reading closer to prose fiction in its essentially linear
movement. Most poems require readers to visit them again, sometimes at once,
sometimes after an interval. Arising from such awarenesses, there has been an
increasing belief that poems should be experienced before they are analysed. It is much
less common now to encounter the kind of practice in which poems were read as if they
were prose comprehension passages, a method which took classes through line by line,
confronting a series of riddles which only the teacher knew how to solve ‘correctly’.
Rather more frequently than with novels, teachers are concerned to prepare a class to
meet poems, especially those where the density of thought or the multifaceted nature of
the images pose questions which a reader must address. Sometimes teachers ask
students to sit quietly with eyes closed while, in a technique familiar in drama classes,
they are ‘talked into’ the context of the poem so that they are ready for a first meeting.
Whatever means is employed, it is important that the preparation is not so long or so
involving in itself that the poem arrives as an afterthought rather than a climax.
Since poems must make an impact upon that first meeting—even if it is to demand a
second, more reflective, reading—teachers are often concerned with how a first
encounter should be arranged. It may be that the teacher reads the poem aloud; other
means might be a well-prepared reading by several members of the class, a visiting
reader, a taped version, or a silent reading where the physical shape of the poem on the
page is crucial to its reception. The nature of a poem dictates how it is best introduced
to the class or a group.
Once met, a wide range of means of deepening and enhancing a reader’s response is
available. It may be that, to help students feel the rhythms of a poem on their own
pulses, groups will be asked to prepare readings of the poems themselves, using several
voices and even sound effects. Primary and lower secondary teachers sometimes link
mask work, movement and music to the presentation of poems, often culminating in
carefully prepared ‘poetry shows’ for assemblies, parents, younger children, or outside
596 TEACHING FICTION AND POETRY