What are the roots of your interest in poetry? Was there much of it in your school when you were growing up? 

The roots of my interest I think must be in my particular relationship with the English language. Having been sent to an English boarding school at the age of six, speaking only Farsi, I needed to learn English urgently, if only to know where to go, what to do, and be in the swim of things. I have never taken language for granted. Even now, with my languages reversed - for I very quickly forgot how to speak Farsi - when I am trying to learn a new Persian word, I ask about the stem, the root, and I'm surprised when native language speakers seem unsure and slightly taken aback, as if to say "Why not take it for granted?".

At school I was blessed with a most wonderful English teacher, Aubrey de Selincourt. He used to take us out on the downs and read poetry to us in the open air, and poetry has always seemed to me to have air in it and the sounds of bird and wind and sea. Earlier still, we took part in poetry recital competitions, and in retrospect I see that this was marvellous groundwork for writing: searching for the nuance, tone, trying to fit the cadence to the thought, hitting the centre of each note as in singing.

You worked as an actress before making a full-time career in poetry. How do you think your theatre background influences your writing? 

For much of my adult life I worked in theatre and left poetry behind, or so I thought. Now I see how close to poetry theatre is, not least in Shakespeare, but more particularly in my directing work, where again you read the spaces around and between the script as much as the print. These are dreaming spaces, left for the reader to travel in, make connections, a way of 'owning' the poem or script. I've never been drawn to the overtly dramatic, but rather to the fluidity of connections, the fragility of boundaries and how we affect or are affected by the smallest things.

Why do you think poetry in schools is important? 

I see an innate connection between poetry and youth. When we are young, we are still alive to the elasticity of time and the dissolving of the boundaries between our own consciousness and outer things. Children can stare for hours, like cats, at a single spot or object. They can enter imaginatively into another being. And they do this voluntarily, unselfconsciously. It's not like actors being told "Now be a tree". But when we grow up we find ways of imitating natural processes we had but have lost. Hence writing and acting exercises.

Is there something special about extended writing experiences, such as the residential courses for schools you tutor for the Arvon Foundation?

Residential Arvon courses*, lasting a week, mean you have the opportunity to meld reading, writing and living into the same process, which is as it should be. Each stream feeds into the others and is fed by them. And for anyone wanting to continue to write poetry, the feeling of it being part of your life, or even being your life, is what keeps you going: it's the air that poetry breathes.

What advice would you give to teachers wanting to encourage young poets?

You can't write without reading. Reading poetry, for all the writing courses in the world, is the one true teacher. Read what you like, don't like; understand, don't understand. Whatever your reaction to what you read, it's not cast in stone. Time and experience will always shift perspectives. What's difficult today becomes easy tomorrow, and vice versa. 

I see no reason to expect poetry to be easy, either in the reading or in the writing. Or to expect good poetry to be difficult. I find both attitudes reductive. Nowadays, we expect people to be able to write poetry without having been steeped in it, without loving it or knowing much about it. Impossible. It would be like asking me to teach physics. I have worked with teachers, though, who have astonished me with their enthusiasm, dedication and their own writing talent. And their students have been fired up with the same infectious energy.

Having read many poems written in school, it seems to me there's a common misapprehension that the language of poetry differs essentially from that of prose. So that young people, who could write perfectly naturally about a given subject in prose, suddenly become stilted, shy of words and expression and constrained by short, stiff sentences they mistake for economy. The only demonstrable difference between prose and verse is the linebreak, which guides the reader as to rhythm, pace, phrasing and emphasis. The fear of free verse as 'chopped-up prose' has to my mind produced a welter of poems far away from natural speech and thought. It's hardly a wonder that so many people still think of poetry as alien to them, whereas prose remains a means of expression everyone takes for granted. Of course, there's a great deal more to writing poetry, but expressing yourself as naturally as you would in prose or speech is a great place to begin.

Much is rightly said about young people's 'imagination'. But do we know what we mean by this? Are we talking about 'fancy'? Imagination is something about being able to enter the mind and heart of things, including oneself, and not necessarily to do with dragons with predictably funny-coloured wings.

* For more details about Arvon's work with schools and teachers please contact Stephanie Anderson, Education Officer, The Arvon Foundation, 020 7262 2788 london@arvonfoundation.org 

Mimi Khalvati's books include The Chine (published 2001), In White Ink, Mirrorwork and Entries on Light; her Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in 2000. She is well known for her workshops and courses for adults and children, and has tutored many Arvon Foundation writing courses. Last year she was Poet in Residence with the Royal Mail under the Poetry Society's Poetry Places scheme.

Questions or comments? e-mail: jeansprackland@poetrysociety.org.uk

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