Excluded
by
Andy Croft
BBC
Radio Four recently spent a week with poet Andy Croft in an EBD
school in Spennymoor, County Durham. The result was 'Excluded',
broadcast on BBC Radio Four on 13 March.
Going
into schools these days is a complicated business. You are expected
to be entertaining and funny and accessible. You are
often there so that the school can show it has taken steps to
address literacy problems identified in the last OFSTED report, and
to help the school promote itself in the local paper. You are
required to help deliver the national literacy strategy, and more
often than not to address issues like bullying, drugs and racism.
You are supposed to help raise levels of self-esteem, especially
among working-class children. You are expected to inspire reluctant
male readers to pick up a book and enjoy it. You are somehow
supposed to legitimise the world of books. And if all that were not
enough, these days poetry must do its bit to tackle issues of social
exclusion.
It's
an impossible task, of course. Not least because poets and poetry
have done so much to make people feel that they are excluded from
the world of literature, creativity and poetry, that they do not
belong, that most books are written by and for and about other kinds
of people. 'Exclusion' is not only an economic description ; it's a
cultural one too. It's all very well to assert that poetry belongs
to everyone. But that's not how it feels to most people. Why should
children in an EBD school like The Meadows be expected to take any
interest in poetry? What's in it for them?
These
'reluctant male readers' (such a delicate euphemism, as though
reading is the only thing they are reluctant to do) can be a scary
lot. I try to armour myself with the books I have written, mostly
about football, for Hodder/Livewire. Football may be an easy button
to press, but it rarely fails to arouse some interest among the boys
on the back row who at first don't see the books, only their
subjects. Occasionally this can rebound - if they do not like a
particular player or team, they will not like a book about them,
still less respect a writer who could write a book about them. But
these books help to establish my credentials, first as a writer
('Are you famous then ?'), second as someone who thinks and feels
like they do ('Who do you support then ?') and third as a writer who
thinks and feels like they do ('You don't look like a writer !')
When asked what they thought a poet would look like, all the kids in
the Meadows School said they thought I would wear a suit; one
thought I would wear a cravat and talk posh . 'But he's not like
that,' said another -- 'he's got a face and everything !'
It
is difficult to over-state the potential impact of a 'real writer'
who can help to dismantle the cultural and psychological barriers
that stand between so many children and the world of books. It is
also easy to under-estimate how little most children understand
about the way a book is made (I am often asked if I draw the
pictures on my football books - which are of course photographs). My
books about, say, David Beckham, Alan Shearer or Michael Owen,
'naturalise' the world of reading and writing in ways that none of
my other books - poetry, literary criticism and biography - ever
could.
But
books themselves are not enough to inspire reluctant readers to
read. They won't become readers until they have become writers. They
won't read if they won't write. They won't write if they think
writing belongs to someone else. They won't respect, or be curious
about, or be passionate about, or be critical of, other people's
writing until they begin to be some of those things about their own
writing. Books won't belong in their lives until their lives belong
in books.
In
my experience the quickest and most effective way of turning
reluctant readers into writers is through poetry. The self-conscious
use of heightened, patterned, musical language can encourage a sense
of the magic of words, a feeling for the unsuspected power and
pleasure of using language with care and economy and precision, and
an understanding of the importance of memory and anticipation. Half
an hour of improvised, rhythmical, rhyming, whole-class poems (not
necessarily even written down) which 'funnel' everyone towards the
missing rhymes, can quickly encourage a sense of ownership over
poetry.
You
don't have to be 'good at English' to write poetry. Poetry is both
familiar and unfamiliar, both recognisably strange and strangely
recognisable, a democratic creative act that is both equally hard
and equally easy for everyone, whether you are a reader or not. Ask
most children to write a story and the results will be unremarkable.
Even the kids who are 'good at English' will write the way they
talk, as they talk the way they think. And it won't feel or look
much like the kind of story that ends up in a book. But poetry has
special rules - rhythm, rhyme, echo, alliteration, stanza-shape,
diction etc - which won't let you reach for the first word that
comes into your head. You can't write the way you talk. You have to
attend to the rules of the game. Your words have to fit the pattern.
You have to become a writer. And even the most tentative,
second-hand poem looks like a 'real' poem once it is typed up, stuck
on the wall, turned into an A3 poster, published in a
school-magazine or local newspaper. Once you have become a writer,
then just possibly you might become a reader.
Instead
of asking the children at The Meadows to write poems in English
lessons, we decided to take poetry across the entire syllabus. So we
wrote geometric poems in Maths, poems about electricity and magnets
in Science, poems about shopping in Geography. Last lesson each day
a dedicated group of editors sat and typed up all the poems written
during the day. By Friday afternoon we had produced a 32 page,
stapled booklet, Rhyming Riddles and Dizzy Diddles including
valentines acrostics, alliterative poems, a Macbeth rap, a blessing
for a new-born baby, poems about numbers, poems about pets, and
poems about kissing. Everyone in the school was given a copy. Almost
all the children in the school saw their name in print for the first
time.
It
was hard work, and the results weren't always very edifying. There
were some bad moments that week - the boy who escaped by climbing
between the bars at the window, the fight in the dining-room, the
deputy head punched in the face, the boy who spent several hours in
a police cell.
But
there were some utterly memorable moments too. Late one morning,
shortly before dinner-time, when all the boys in the room seemed to
be asleep, a bird flew in through the window into the classroom.
There was pandemonium. Suddenly everyone was wide awake, running
across the desks, trying to catch the bird. Other kids ran in to see
what the noise was about. Then, just as suddenly, one of the boys
stood still in the middle of the room, as if in a trance, and began
improvising, out loud, a poem about what was happening. The whole
room went quiet. It was as though he was speaking in tongues. Having
being exposed to the language and the music of poetry for two days,
Darren had found within him the primitive, magical origins of all
art - in collective experience, in the real or ritual taming of
nature, and in Orphic utterance. And although he may not have been
conscious of it, at some level Darren understood that the bird was a
metaphor for the creativity that was struggling to break free inside
him.
At
that moment, however briefly, we were all 'included', not in some
tacky New Labour stakeholder-dream of student loans and private
health insurance, but in the shared, common humanity that poetry can
still reveal :
I
was sat in my lesson
When a bird flew by
Out of the sky.
It came through the window,
It was trying to get out
By banging into everything.
It was just a little blue tit.
We opened the window more
And then the radio woman Caroline
Caught it by putting her hand out
And grabbing it.
Then she let it go,
Very slowly.
