Poetry At School: A Personal View

So. 

The grey men in grey suits want to remove poetry from the national curriculum do they? Typical. 

Why? A society without poetry is a cold society, blank and functional, going nowhere. A metropolis of empty souls. 

A society fit only for old men in grey suits.

I don't want to live in a society without poetry. Do you?

How beautiful is that? Pablo Neruda. 

Poetry has been a massive part of my life. And that started at school. 

I did not like school at all, especially the practical and vocational aspects the Government are now keen to promote. 

Without poetry, I wonder, what would I have done? To this day, I am utterly dimwitted when it comes to tools and mathematics and science and no amount of support and training or government policy can change that. 

When I was a kid, I once constructed a go-kart in our garage – a go kart with no axles so it simply wouldn’t roll. I was so proud of that go-kart, but everyone on the road laughed at me.

In woodwork at school, I tried to make a shark out of wood and it ended up looking like a pencil with no lead. In metalwork, I tried to make a ruler and it ended up more like a parallelogrammatic credit card. Everyone laughed at that too. 

In Chemistry, my only formal contact with a Bunsen burner and its fiendish beakers was when our teacher lashed me in the face with the bendy tube for some now long-forgotten crime. Everyone in the class laughed as I fell off the chair and cracked my head on the formica tiles.

In PE (football, or hockey), I can only remember Mr H, a Yorkshireman every bit as violent and narcissistic as the teacher out of Kes who thought he was Bobby Charlton. 

Once, during football, I accidently fouled a lad called Kevin. We started with the handbags, as you do. The teacher trotted over nonchalantly and smashed our foreheads together leaving us writhing on the ground with concussion while he trotted off again, whistling. 

Everyone on the muddy, slanted pitch laughed and laughed and laughed.

I hated school, particularly the vocational and non-academic stuff like the above. 

The stuff they are trying to promote now. 

I have no fond memories of school after eleven at all. I couldn’t wait for it to end, to be honest. 

Yet, I loved English and to this day, I love poetry. 

Without English and Poetry, I would have been so deep in life's shit I don’t think I would have ever come out.

And it worked for me. Poetry. No-one laughed at me in an English class because I was quite talented with a pen. 

Still can’t do a thing with a screwdriver or a battery drill (still can’t change a plug and have spent the last two days trying to change the inner tube in my rear tyre if anyone can help), but I can write a coherent paragraph and I know the difference between a quatrain and a stanza.

I learnt that at school in the poetry segments of the English curriculum. 

I learned about Byron and Shelley and the epistolary love between Barratt and Browning. I read the good bits of Beowulf and the naughty bits in Chaucer and the beautiful bits of Shakespeare. I was introduced to the Beat poets by Mr Fothergill, who taught History but was a brilliant writer and a published poet. I enjoyed performing. I played John Proctor in The Crucible (and through it learned how patriarchal societies exploit and suppress women, which I wasn’t learning anywhere else in eighties Britain). 

I was happy to read out my poems in class in a way I didn’t want to read out prose. Reading prose in public seems wrong, but oh so right with poetry.

Poetry is a visual, spoken form. The two are completely different disciplines and I learned that at school too. 

The men in grey suits have seemingly forgotten this.

Reading poetry was like acting, or singing, or entertaining rather than writing or reading. It was as distinct a discipline as physics is to history.

I only wished there was more poetry and less functional algebra, which I have never, ever subsequently used to any practical purpose.

I wish I could tell you that I was a brilliant performer, but I was not and am not – however, I was given the opportunity to try on the curriculum and no-one laughed when I did and I learned to present information in front of a class, which came in seriously useful in the future. 

Had I been a pupil in 2021, I would have been in big trouble.

You know what happens when something becomes voluntary in a school: It gets lost in the hinterland of the Extra Curriculum.

If you are a young man, in the murky, grudging extrazone, if you secretly want to learn something arty, you are usually up against football practice with your mates, or the character-building boxing training, or something practical and vocational you can use on an apprenticeship.

If you are a young man, you already can’t be bothered to read because you have Doom:Eternal Boss Level 2 to conquer and now you won’t have to bother with poetry at all because you’re playing the school up the road in the semi-finals next week and you need to sharpen up the left peg 

Putting poetry in the Extra Curriculum twilight zone is counter productive. 

Poetry pays for itself. Poetry may enrich society, granted, but it allows massive practical skills too, useful for all young people, especially in a service, customer-focused, communication-based economy. 

It allows you to write, to talk, to present, to listen, to use language in ways your competitors aren't. It allows you to innovate and to imagine ways to innovate. It inspires and it kickstarts creativity.

I use the poetry skills I learned at school on the curriculum not only for writing, which I use every day, but for presentations which have helped make the companies I work for about £20 million over the years and helped thousands of people into work. 

I have spoken on the radio and I have written books, several of which owe more to poetry than they do to prose because, in the end, poetry is about language and how it is used and I have always - thanks to my English teachers - been more interested in form than content. 

The most beautiful paragraph for me is more beautiful than the most beautiful story. 

I learned that in Poetry too.

I sold thousands of copies of a book called Ultra Violence, partly based on my experiences at school. In the first chapter, a true story, the narrator describes a scene where he is seriously assaulted and nearly murdered by his classmates for some imagined slight. 

http://greenwizardpublishing.blogspot.com/2012/10/bullying-sequence-from-ultra-violence.html

It has been described by a few people as one of the best chapters ever written in a football novel. It also uses poetry as a metier. It’s written with an eye on rhythm and pentameter, things I learned at school. I attach a link here, so if you do read it, don’t expect vocational functionalist prose like, say, that of Dan Brown who wouldn’t know rhythm in prose if it bit him on his overfilled wallet. 

I sold 1500 copies of a book called “Carla” which has been

widely praised and whose last two chapters are fundamentally poetry in prose form. I learned that at school too.

I’m not here to sell these books (those days are over), but the news that the Tories are planning to remove poetry from the national curriculum has inspired me to think about what that actually means.

 If I hadn’t have had strong English teachers (Miss Wyatt, Mrs Ellis, Mr Turney to name but three), with a passion for poetry beyond education, then I would have been a complete failure in life.

I don't have literary parents. Nor am I middle class. I didn’t have an idyllic Blue Remembered Hills background. My school was resolutely comprehensive. My dad was a hundred hour week working electrician and my mum was disabled. Money was tight and your life choices in the town I was born in were fourfold in 1980: 

Pit, army, sixth form or catering college.

Without the opportunity to learn poetry and English in general (and to a lesser extent, History), I wouldn’t have bothered at school at all. 

I had absolutely no idea I liked poetry until I tried it at school. Until those teachers showed it to me. Until I was exposed to it.

Removing poetry from the national curriculum is astonishingly brutal and silly and stupid. It’s also counter-productive. What would I have done back then? 

You can stick me in front of a lathe to make a dowelling rod or something and Shakespeare’s hundred monkeys on the next lathe along would do a better job than I would. 

I am positive, I am convinced, I am adamant that there are thousands of talented young people who would make terrible lathe operators but brilliant poets(and sales reps, and marketing experts, and graphic designers and, er, politicians) if the opportunity to learn poetry is there, and most kids aren’t going to know that in the Extra Curriculum. 

With poetry, you have to be shown.

It's a hidden, veiled exquisition that needs to be introduced.

You have to have the opportunity to be exposed to the poets and the rewards are boundless.

The national curriculum is ideal for this.

Poetry is one of those things that continues to give time and time and again, and it keeps on giving, but someone needs to introduce you to its beauty first.

It needs to stay on the curriculum for pupils like me who needed it.

Mark

Soon, I'll tell you just how culturally diverse poetry is and how this decision is quite astonishing in 2020, especially after the events of this summer.