Weaving Words

1. Weaving Words Students’ Thinking about Poetry Debra Myhill

2. The mechanic should sit down among levers, screws, wedges, wheels etc. like a poet among the letters of the alphabet, considering them as the exhibition of his thoughts, in which a new arrangement transmits a new Idea to the world. Robert Fulton – 19th Century Engineer

3. Teacher. Lesson planner, boredom banner Moral pillar,  mayhem stiller Concept thrower, future-sower, Power dresser,  mug obsessor, Late night marker, silence-barker, Blame absorber Stress bin.

4. Teacher’s Red Pen I give merit where it is due I give responses to your best guess I give you the benefit of the doubt I give you a qualified ‘no’ or a resounding ‘yes’ The hand that holds me makes me tick, makes me cross The hand that holds me is the voice I am given The hand that holds me sorts the good from the dross The hand that holds me writes the words that are written I inspire you to carry on I urge you to stop dead I tell you to ‘see me’ I force you to see red

5. Interview Questions How well do you think each poem is written? What makes them successful or unsuccessful for you? How can you tell these are both poems? What about the sentences or lines? Can you comment on how effective the structure or shaping is? What about the word choices? Can you comment on the effectiveness of the vocabulary? How could the poems be improved? This isn’t a test and there aren’t wrong or right answers – we just want to know what you think and how specific you can be in explaining your judgements.

6. Poetry is different • No fixed rules • It doesn’t always make complete sense…it sometimes doesn’t always flow like a story would. • When you write poetically you kind of describe it more thoroughly… it seems softer somehow; • It’s not trying to tell you something, it’s trying to show you about something. • It doesn’t tell you exactly what it is • sneaky; like a puzzle

7. How do you know it is a poem? • It couldn’t be a story ‘cos it’s too short and it couldn’t just be a passage of writing, because each sentence starts the same way. • You can tell they’re poems because they start in the same… the Teacher’s Red Pen starts with the same word but you wouldn’t normally see that in a story or another piece of writing. • Teacher’s Red Pen, that one’s got verses, and the way it’s set out it’s like a song, like that’s almost like a chorus and it’s got verses and the ends of the sentences rhyme. The Teacher one, you can tell that’s a poem because the way it’s set out it couldn’t really be anything else, and it does rhyme and because it’s like two short statements next to each other, that’s the way quite a lot of poems are set out.

8. To rhyme or not to rhyme The majority stated that poetry doesn’t have to rhyme but many preferred poems that did Rhyme made poems: • fast and upbeat; • it just fits perfect; • it makes a good effect when it rhymes ‘cos it just like flows through the poem; • it flows a lot better and I find it easier to read it. Rhyme was also considered an aid to meaning: • it made the lines ‘stronger, if you know what I mean’; • it kind of makes me get it more, I don’t know why, just understand it more.

9. No rhyme • It doesn’t always have to rhyme to make it good; you can just put in some really good words • The less it rhymes it creates kind of atmosphere, like real, serious. Rhyming poems should only be with something not that serious… and something serious should be like, something rhythmic • There’s lots of different ways you can rhyme, there’s like line and line, and the stuff like rhyming couplet and it depends like on what you’re basing the poem on as to what you’re going to do with the rhymes.

10. Explaining rhyme They found it harder to discuss possible explain the effects or reasons for different choices, as the following exchange shows: So how might the rhymes be linked to what you’re basing the poem on? It’s like The Night Mail one had line on line, like every single line rhymed to the one above it, but The Highwayman had rhyming couplets in different places. Do you think there was a reason why The Night Mail had pairs of lines that rhymed, whereas The Highwayman had them spaced out? No.

11. Getting the beat • There’s different ways of saying a poem…you don’t have to just read it, you can like rhyme it, say it at different pitches • keeping the poem on the move all the time… flowing really well A student who played jazz piano made an interesting link between poetry and music, commenting: • They both have to have a very strong rhythm for it to work, and sort of each word is like a note and you’ve got to choose your words and notes carefully in both. • You need to emphasise certain words so if you put certain words in a certain rhythm you’ve got to find the right place in the rhythm to put it.

12. Line shaping Aware of visual effects of line length: • They don’t have to be like really long lines or really short lines you can just have it, like how you want them to be, they don’t have to be a set way; • If it was like all one long line then it wouldn’t look like a poem and you would just like read it all in one go but when it’s set out you can make it shorter and stuff like that, or put it in like the shape of what you’re talking about, like if you’re talking about a hammer you can put it in the shape of a hammer, and it makes it more effective and more interesting to look at. • If you had it all in the same line it wouldn’t really look like a poem

13. Line shaping Much less confidence talking about the meaning-making possibilities in line length: • Those two words that rhyme, they have to be at the end of two of the lines so you can just do the other two lines around that really a structural feature • The shape of a poem’s determined by how many syllables in each sentence • Why do you think the writers may have chosen to make the lines different lengths • I don’t really know. • Honestly, I don’t have a clue with the lengths

14. Structural choices • ’Blame absorber’ isn’t like really important, it’s like the same as ‘silence barker’ so I don’t see why that one’s got its own line, it’s not special enough, but I like the ‘stress bin’, on its last line. I think that’s the good bit, like they’ve chosen where that would go quite well. • All of the top leads to the bottom one, ‘stress bin’ • It’s good to have the short lines at the end because, at the start you give all the hints of what it is and at the end it gives you a little summary of what the whole thing’s describing.

15. Structural choices • It’s got the opposite, I give you a no and then a yes, and then a tick and then a cross. • It’s like the good side of the teacher and then ‘I tell you’ and ‘I force you’ they’re like the not as good sides • Ever since I was little I’ve always thought ‘that looks like a poem’ ...it’s repetitive, we did like this “A FOREST” thing, which is like loads of different things and then repetition is one which is there, I give I give, the hand the hand, and it rhymes occasionally but I don’t know if they were meant to do that.

16. Is it a line or is it a sentence? When you’re writing poems how do you choose where to start a new line? You just really think of a sentence, write it down and then think is that enough and if it is just put a comma or if it’s the end put a full stop and then start a new line or paragraph. You don’t have to write like full sentencing explaining what had actually happened like in detail, you can just sort of do it like short and snappy sentences but you can also do quite long ones in the middle or something.

17. How to improve a poem? You add things: • I’d maybe add a few more kennings and possibly an extra sentence so it isn’t completely a list… if they had like one long sentence every three lines or something half way and then stress bin on the end, on its own as the shortest line, it would be better • In Teacher’s Red Pen I would put more punctuation in to make each bit separate and each bit has its own different meanings so it doesn’t just carry on into the next line • ’I force you to see red’, I would have put a word in front of ‘red’, like a ‘blazing red’ or something because it sounds better, it’s more descriptive

18. A matter of personal taste • make the vocabulary easier to understand… shorter and snappier • Do a like nowadays vocabulary • It took me a while to understand that it was the red pen talking so if they made it maybe a bit clearer at the beginning… • Put an exclamation mark on the end of ‘I urge you to stop dead’, because it makes you say it a bit differently, makes you say it like almost a bit louder, (with) more energy; •  If there was something like an exclamation mark after ‘see me’ to make it stand out a bit more;