‘The tongue is more to be feared than the sword.’ Japanese proverb
I’d gone into schools before and enjoyed it. The teachers were welcoming and friendly; the children enthusiastic about writing poetry with a ‘real’ poet. But this school, a boy’s comprehensive, was different. The Head of English was surly and suspicious. He didn’t introduce me to any of the other teachers. He didn’t tell me anything about the boys I was to work with: just gave me the class registers with strict instructions to fill them in. Obviously, he didn’t want me there. Maybe he thought poets were anarchists.
‘We don’t accept any work that contains sex or violence,’ he said.
The classroom he led me to was right at the back of the school with windows facing north. The walls were bile yellow as if to compensate for the lack of sun. There was a smell of boiled cabbage and toilets. As soon as he’d gone, I stood on a chair to open a window. Then a bell rang and the first group of boys burst in. There were catcalls and wolf-whistles.
‘Great view of your knickers, Miss,’ a boy called out.
Certainly, the boys were interested in sex. ‘Have you got a boyfriend? Is he good in bed?’ was a running gag. I thought of getting them to write a sestina with that as one of the recurring lines; but resisted it.
There were five groups altogether, ranging in age from eleven to fifteen: all equally unruly and unresponsive. They’d volunteered for poetry, it turned out, to escape from music. Their reaction, even to Hughes and Heaney, was groans and yawns. Asked to write a poem, they were sullen and mutinous.
Wednesdays were my teaching day. I got to dread them. It wasn’t helped that I spent Tuesday nights tossing and turning or racked with nightmares. Part of the condition of my contract was to put together an anthology and organize a reading to which parents and governors would be invited. By the fifth and final week I was desperate. I’d got one day left to turn them on to poetry.
I’d prepared a session on poem portraits, using Norman MacCaig’s poem ‘Aunt Julia’ as inspiration. But as I was waiting for the first group to come in I flicked through The Rattle Bag, the Heaney-Hughes anthology. My eye fixed on Robert Frost’s poem, ‘“Out, Out –”’, about a boy who accidentally cuts off his hand with a circular saw. On an impulse, I read them that instead:
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard …
The room went quiet. I could hear the boys’ breathing; my voice almost a whisper as I neared the end:
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little – less – nothing! – and that ended it.
One boy remembered a brother drowning; another a grandfather’s story of losing his leg in the War. They were interested; engaged; even prepared to talk about the way Frost used language; suspense; the senses. Then, I set them to write: about an accident; or something terrible happening. They had to use the senses, like Frost; and write, if possible from their own experience.
Before, I’d had to squeeze poems out of them like juice out of dry lemons: and those were mostly clichéd and dull. Now, they wrote freely and with energy and imagination: poems about car and boating accidents; about scaldings and falling out of trees, about baby seals being clubbed; about torturing a cat.
The poem had the same effect on every group. Then, in the final session of the day, just as the boys were about to begin reading their poems aloud, the Head of English walked in.
‘Carry on,’ he said, and sat at the back.
It would be untrue to say that every poem was wonderful. But they all had sparks of energy. And some, like Frost’s poem, were powerful and moving and shocking. There was one about a boy losing his eye in a fight after a football match; and one about a party of schoolchildren buried under an avalanche; and another about a family burned alive in a house fire.
After every poem there was applause. But the teacher didn’t clap.
‘They were good, weren’t they?’ I said to him when the boys had left the classroom.
He said nothing: not ‘Yes,’ or ‘No’.
The anthology never materialized. The evening reading with the parents and governors was cancelled.
After that experience, I stopped going into schools. I got a full-time job teaching in a college. Strangely, I began to address sex and violence as themes in my own work. There’s nothing like forbidding something to make it the topmost thing in your mind. But I don’t think it had anything to do with the teacher’s embargo. It’s more likely I learned the lesson from the boys: writing about something that really engages you.