Wednesday, 8 March 2000
Poet Laureate calls for more poetry in schools
Poet Laureate Andrew Motion today called for poetry to be a higher priority in schools. Delivering the Arts Council/RSA Annual Lecture at the RSA in London, he said: "I'm particularly interested in the idea of establishing a regular series of weekend conferences for teachers, at which they can share thoughts about their various aims and difficulties as teachers of poetry, and meet invited poets as well. I'm also keen to develop and diversify the Writers in Schools initiative that was set up during the National Year of Reading...so that reading and/or listening, and writing, can be more closely entwined."
During his speech, which was entitled Poetry in Public and chaired by Claire Amitstead, Literary Editor of The Guardian, Professor Motion also stressed the importance of the Government's Literacy Hour initiative and other poetry projects. He said: "The existing Literacy Hour is one of the bravest and most valuable initiatives taken by the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE): an absolutely essential thing. But as the Department is the first to realise, literacy is the beginning of a process, as well as a self-sufficient virtue, and beyond it lies the huge country of free and unhindered reading, and of culture in general.
"... there has also been a terrific effort to demystify and humanise all sorts of writing... poetry on the internet, the regular visits poets make to schools, and residencies within schools by poets, which have been imaginatively orchestrated by the Poetry Society and in many cases funded by the Arts Council and Regional Arts Boards ... programmes devised by the DfEE and others to address particular issues and problems associated with the teaching of poetry - its reputation for being difficult and irrelevant."
For a link to the full text of this speech, go to the March (2000) Press Release in:
www.artscouncil.org.uk/news/index.html
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