Guidance on writing poetry from prizewinning poet Akulah Agbami … how to construct a poem, how to capture an idea and how to have fun with words.
Poetry is fun! Poetry is easy! Everybody can produce interesting and moving poems. You don’t have to be great at grammar, brilliant at spelling, a wiz with punctuation or possess an enormous vocabulary. With a poem you can’t get it ‘wrong’. You can improve on a basic idea and polish your work, tinkering with a line or a word here or there. But it’s not wrong. And if you’re not happy, you can start the process again. Nor do you have to go striding around the Lake District looking for clumps of daffodils. You can produce an incredible poem in the grimiest, noisiest, busiest inner city.
Poems are amazingly resilient. You can write a poem anywhere. You can write a poem about anything. Sometimes in my poetry workshops I ask students to think of a subject you can’t write a poem about. Some wacky ideas emerge. ‘A spanner’ ‘A bowl of cold custard’ ‘Dirty finger nails’ ‘A piece of dog poo!’ Not the most inspiring of subjects, but all definitely potential subjects for poems.
There is no set form to a poem. There are infinite poetic forms. BUT there are certain poetic conventions, conventions which when placed in a context and explored and explained, become easy to acquire.
Working with selected words from the SLN Poetry Challenge – Akulah demonstrates how to construct a poem from a single word and provides individual guidance for Key Stage 1, Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3.
“WISH”
Guidance for Key Stage 1
Encourage children to work with a partner. Repeat partner’s name twice and then add following line. For example:
Tariq, Tariq if you could have a wish
What would it be?
Encourage children to come up with three things that would make them happier but they can be simple and accessible.
Tariq, Tariq
If you could have a wish
What would it be?
I’d go shopping with
My mum all day
Take my dog
For a long run in the park
And have pizza for my tea
A special wish for me!
Guidance for Key Stage 2
Collective poems are brilliant since you get a real sense of class ownership. Encourage children to come up with wishes to make the world a better place. If a child proposes a really long sentence, get the rest of the children to help trim it down. Six to seven words is the maximum here. Try to gather five fairly varied lines and write them on the board. For example:
I wish all wars had ended
I wish each child had love
Lots of food for everyone
Clean rivers, clean air
Time to enjoy the beauty
This is the basic poem but jazz it up by splitting class into two groups and repeating the first line three times; line 2 four times; line 3 four times; line 4 three times; line 5 six times etc. So group one says line 1 and then group two echoes the line. In line 5 group one starts out boldly, and group two gradually fades out. Collective poems of this nature are brilliant for raising awareness and allowing children to really think and distil that thinking – they love all the chanting, handclapping and finger clicking if you can incorporate this.
Guidance for Key Stage 3
Get students to write a dialogue between a child in a rich country and a child in a poor country, not exactly talking to each other but sharing a wish list. Students can indicate who’s who by using different font types or italics. They can play around with how the wishes are articulated by using alternate lines or a group of thoughts from one child, interspersed with another group of thoughts from another. If students struggle they can work in pairs so that one student is from a rich country and the other is from a poor country.
Wish List
Man! I’ve just got to have an iphone like all my mates!!!
I wish our well was not so far away
A holiday to Jamaica
It would be so good to drink clean, cool water
Man! I need another KFC
On any day to have more than one measly meal
My computer’s ancient now! I want one of those tablets
A brand new school book with no pages rubbed out
Typical Saturday at the bowling alley, cinema, in town
Typical Saturday with the goats and watching the sun go down
“WORLD”
Guidance for Key Stage 1
A simple ‘acrostic’ poem words with no more than five words per line:
World
Whirling and wonderful
Opportunities to be, do, learn
Raging rivers and snaking streams
Love like a flickering candle
Determines almost all we do
Then get the children to play with the words and see what they can come up with. Stick to the ‘five word maximum per line’ rule but the poem can be any number of lines. For example:
Whirling love
Raging candle
Determines all
We learn
We do
Like a stream
Flickering
Opportunities to be
Love
Guidance for Key Stage 2
Get children to select a country they have never heard of. Allow them 10 minutes to research the country using Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org/. Write a seven-line poem in which some words are repeated to produce a miniature snapshot of the country.
Guidance for Key Stage 3
Go onto the BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/ and check the world news section. Read an article about a part of the world you know very little about. Use the article to supply you with information to fashion into a poem with a maximum of 10 lines, with a maximum three words per line. Very, very short lines in poetry produce an unusual rhythm. Feel free to steal phrases and words. I also like to play around with displaying lines on a page to produce something visually surprising.
