by Kate Clanchy
But Michael’s poem is in no sense a copy; if anything, it’s a reading of the source poem, because it takes on the gender question raised by her poem so cleverly and powerfully. Mariner’s is about female stereotypes and fantasy, about Beauty and the Beast, that powerful ancient tale of being sold to a hideous husband and learning to love enslavement, a story she subverts first with the image of her real, kindly father in his Volvo, and then with the ‘calf-bound volume’ with its ‘quality thud’ which symbolizes freedom of the mind. Michael’s poem replies with an equally powerful account of a masculine stereotype – the Superman story, the cape of power – and subverts that by showing the whole Superman story to be a fantasy of rescue. The boy with his head in the toilet is clearly the same child who is waiting for the ‘freak accident’; they both need to be wrapped in a cape and reassured. And then there is the aspect of display and dress-up: the fluttering cape that is put on to be seen, just as, more conventionally, a woman puts on a dress. I could not have hoped for a more powerful or accomplished literary reply, in short, if I’d lectured my MA students for an hour and set the task as coursework.
But no lecturing had happened at all. No one mentioned iambs, or stereotypes, or subversion, or even gender. All we did, in our group of teenagers sitting round in the library – all I ever do, in fact – was read the poem, and chat, not about how the poem worked, but about what it provoked in us. We talked about Disney’s princesses and Superman a lot, because we were a very multicultural group, and these were our universal gods, and then we drifted on to what we planned to ask for when the fairy finally appeared and offered us three wishes; and about time-turners, and self-renewing purses, and wings, which of course everyone had hoped to have.
I shushed them and read the poem aloud again while they sat with their eyes shut. Then I asked them to begin writing with the phrase: ‘When I was a child,’ and to write down a childhood dream which makes them blush, now, actually makes their skin prickle. And after a long time of pens scratching, I gave them another prompt: to put a turn in their poem, a different perspective: ‘but now I see.’ And that was it.
So all the cleverness of Michael’s poem – its varied rhythm and sound, its delicate play of tone, irony, and expectations – came from what he had absorbed from the Mariner poem, just from listening to it, not analysing it. If we had spent time on discussing literary features, in fact, it is highly likely that Michael would have lost interest, because, though Michael clearly has what poets call a golden ear, his metalanguage – his vocabulary for discussing language – is particularly weak. When I showed him Prof K’s analysis of the sounds of his poem, he was pleased, but baffled. He really didn’t know what the Professor meant.
This paradoxical mismatch of talents – the pronounced ability to pick up and reproduce poetic shapes and sounds solely by listening to them, teamed with an equally marked inability to analyse writing – is not uncommon; Michael is merely an extreme example. Only a couple of the students in the room during the Mariner workshop could have written a decent A Level-style analysis of her poem, yet all of them wrote interesting versions of the poem, picking up different elements of the tone, theme, and sound. For example, this is Helen’s, who was twelve at the time, and, as you can tell, bookish and brilliant.
I wanted to be
the girl with the twelve-mattressed four-posted bed.
Not a princess, just an ordinary girl
who never felt the pea.
I wanted to be
the woman in a meadow of brown grass and flowers,
wanted my hair to curl in a spiral
and blow in the wind.
I wanted to be
Amy March with her pickled limes,
wanted to stand a proud
pretty crosspatch in front of the class.
I wanted to be
a hidden face in the snowy picture book,
wanted to watch the snake in the casket
from the frosted hedge,
wanted to see it bite the children,
wanted to be indifferent.
Yet even someone as clever as Helen disappears into a creative haze of A4 and orange gel pen when she writes, and if you were to nudge her mid-way, and ask her to point to a metaphor, or just an inspirational line from the source poem, she would not be able to do so.
But then, neither could I. When I’m in the middle of writing a poem, or any piece of writing, even this, I also feel as if I am in a fog of sound and images, feel that I am building a bridge, stick by stick, in the direction of what I hope, but could not swear, is the other side of the river. It’s an absorbing, crafting, instinctive process which feels entirely different from the critiquing/labelling/essay-writing one I have so painfully learned over many years. I’m prepared to bet, in fact, that critiquing happens in a different part of the brain, and that only the editing and drafting process of writing, especially the final polishing stages, use both areas.
While Michael and Helen were absorbed in writing their poems, they leant on the Mariner poem; in particular, they both borrowed that shapely shift in perspective from adult to child which is the keystone of all three poems. So they were responding to the poem, but not critiquing it. This is not a student or beginner’s writing process. I’m always echoing or answering or leaning on another poem when I write, too; it’s just that because I have read so much verse, it usually isn’t clear to me which piece I have in mind. For example, I once wrote a poem about Simeon Stylites without consciously remembering that I had read, and even written an essay about, a Tennyson poem on the same subject a decade previously. When I finally came to look up Tennyson’s poem – long after my own poem was published – I found I had begun mine with the same word: ‘Although’.
All poets lean and borrow and echo. Poems come from poems; part of the game of literary criticism is to trace the ways they build on, love, hate, knock down, answer, abuse, and adore each other. But that game ignores something much simpler: the universal, the gloriously ordinary, the simply human capacity to answer a speech pattern with a speech pattern, a poem with a poem. It’s like responding to a dance step with a dance step, or singing a note back to a note: it’s a thing we can all do; though, as with dance and singing, some individuals are much more deft, elegant, and interested than others, and a few, like Michael and Helen, have a notable gift. If you doubt me – try it. Without thinking too hard, write down a few lines beginning: ‘When I was a child, I worried,’ then listen to what you have done. You’ll echo that iambic beat too, that deadpan tone. But you’ll write your own poem.
In school, I rarely have more than an hour a week with any group, so I’ve come to lean on this echoing capacity almost to the exclusion of everything else. The quickest way I know to get results, and to let everyone write something good, is to give the students a great poem, and, without letting too much anxiety and analysis get in the way, give them the space to sing me one back. The poem chosen is very important; it needs to sound beautiful and to be emotionally direct – like the Mariner one.
Poems don’t produce copies of themselves; they accommodate and differentiate. Beginners will cling to the frame of a poem, the rhetoric or repetitions. Experienced poets are much more independent. They will riff off a line or two, pick up a rhythm, a title, and – always my final instruction – lose my prompts entirely. Everyone gets to read at least one rich poem in my workshops, but the most talented students start to read a lot of poetry for themselves, and to read like poets: observing, stealing, and storing. Similarly, I edit and type up the work of the beginners, bringing out the best in them, but the better students start to edit and re-draft their own poems more and more intensely, learning to visit them from a more critical, outside perspective. Usually – though not Michael Egbe – they finish by acquiring a metalanguage (metaphor, simile, iamb, metre, stanza, line break) to enable them to talk to themselves and others about what they are doing.
Learning to write like this is like mastering a musical instrument: first you learn
to make a good noise through imitation and playing along with other people; then you learn to study your own and others’ technique; finally, and as an option or addition, you write critically about your own and other people’s music. Art is often taught like this too: tracing the lines of a photograph gives the bones of a picture; copying a great picture, brushstroke for brushstroke, is a well-established way of acquiring technique and understanding a painter’s vision.
But playing an instrument and musical composition have always been a central part of the Music curriculum in this country, both at school and at university; and the practice of Art has always been the main component of its study. Writing poetry and fiction, though, is not part of the English curriculum, and in school, especially since the demise of the ill-starred and short-lived A Level in Creative Writing, there is no way of rewarding or marking what Michael and Helen have achieved. In English, we assess and value only that last part of the learning process: the metalanguage and the critical essay.
The reasons for this are complicated. English as an academic subject is much younger than Music, and when it was invented, at the end of the nineteenth century, there was a drive to make it taxing, analytical, and as much like Latin as possible, so that it could be respectable and taken seriously. Therefore, English composition, so babyishly easier and more pleasurable than Latin composition, was excluded. Creative Writing has since been re-introduced into universities, but via the US Liberal Arts model. This practice in turn is divorced from the study of literature; and its central teaching mode is the critical workshop when ambitious young writers photocopy their effusions and share them, which, notoriously, breeds sameness and personal paranoia. Wherever university Creative Writing teachers gather, they mourn that their students do not read, yet they never set an imitation as an exercise. Creative reading and creative response, which Michael, like so many students, finds so natural and so easy, and in which he demonstrates such talent, is not taught, or examined, in any university.
In schools, some creative response is allowed up to GCSE, but after the age of sixteen, English means A Level Literature or Language, and only a couple of syllabuses allow for even the smallest amount of creative response – or any kind of creative writing – to be shoehorned in by dedicated teachers. This focus on only one tiny area of English – critical response – has many toxic effects in schools, but one is to cut down the percentage of pupils continuing with English after the age of sixteen to less than 15 per cent. This is a tragedy: very, very few people – probably 15 per cent of that 15 per cent taking A Level – really enjoy the practice of criticism, but almost everyone enjoys writing and reading. Yet we have no ‘Further English’ in England; no structure or reward for kids who don’t want to write a 2,000-word essay on Jane Eyre but would like to write a story, who don’t want to dissect a Shakespeare play but would like to read and see one, who would like to write a better letter, read another novel, who would like to read and write some poems. Who are entitled to read and write some poems.
Even in the younger years in school, the practice of creative writing and creative reading is under attack; there is certainly a great deal less of it, and less confidently taught, than when I began in teaching thirty years ago. But the decades since I did my PGCE have also seen the inexorable rise of the thing called ‘formative assessment’, and its lumpen classroom symptom, the WALT.
WALT is the acronym, as every schoolchild knows and every parent is surprised to learn, for We Are Learning To. WALTs are put on the board. They head the teacher’s lesson plan. They are ruthlessly monitored during teacher training. WALTs, the theory goes, interact with the curriculum meaningfully and let everyone know where they are. They break up the lesson into simple objectives that the children themselves understand.
WALTs are created for the best reasons: it’s about empowering students to control their own learning and chart their own progress; it’s about openness and democracy; it’s about spreading out skillsets so everyone can find their tool; it’s about opening what educationalists Black and Wiliam, in a highly influential essay read by every teaching student, called the ‘black box’, the hidden learning process. Tease out the strands of this process, goes the argument, think out exactly what the student is learning, then deliver that analysis back to them precisely, telling them what they have achieved, and what they can build on. This is ‘formative assessment’, because it forms and changes the student as well as marking him.
All of which sounds fine, sounds good, sounds liberal; except when you remember that Black and Wiliam were writing about the learning of engineering; except when you start wondering: what is the WALT for the lesson that led to Michael’s poem? Should we say Michael is learning to read today, or to write? Shall we say he is learning to use irony, or to control half-rhyme, or to discuss gender issues or the use of clichés, or perhaps punctuation across stanza breaks? And even if you had spent a strenuous half-hour predicting the sort of things Michael might get from the lesson, and synthesizing them into a millefeuille WALT, a poem in itself – how would that have fitted Helen’s very different reading and writing experience?
And then – how shall we assess what they have done? What Learning Objectives (LOs) has Michael met and how can he improve next time? What about Helen? Who has done better at learning about gender? Shall we ask Michael to try some repetition in his next poem? Or encourage Helen to move on with half-rhyme? Do any of these questions have any relevance at all to Helen or Michael as writers or as people? Does this ‘formative assessment’ form anything?
This is not a farce: these are real and serious questions. In the twenty-five years since I started teaching, teachers have been increasingly bullied and harassed over these sorts of classroom minutiae to the point where they genuinely feel that Ofsted will descend if they teach an unconventional, non-WALT lesson. This is bad for all teachers but is particularly so in subjects where learning compartmentalizes less tidily; it is harder to say what is going in your English lesson than your Maths lesson, in History than in Chemistry. For the creative parts of the curriculum, the pressure is cruel. When my colleague Linda revealed at a conference that she had taught her GCSE students poetry by writing creatively all the way up to GCSE, the listening teachers were genuinely frightened. They assumed her students were being deprived of ‘skills’ and would fail their exams. They were only comforted, and amazed, when Linda showed them that oddly enough, this had worked; her students all made outstanding progress, and especially in poetry. When I led, in 2016, a poetry teaching workshop for newly qualified teachers and started as I have here, with Michael Egbe, one young woman simply wept. She said, through her tears, that she was upset because she thought I was making fun of her. She had wanted to go into teaching to teach creative writing, but it didn’t fit in the curriculum; it was impossible, she could not find the LO for it. You can’t assess it. There isn’t a WALT. The young teachers around her agreed. Creative writing is impossible because you can’t break it up. It’s too hard to strand, mark, and turn into data.
And yes, it is difficult to strand Michael’s poem, because it is a good, tightly woven unit of language: a work of art. So is Lorraine Mariner’s poem. And the process by which Michael turned one into the other is certainly too complex to describe; it is both great and ineffable. No WALT can compass Art or Greatness, for its own language is too crude. Formative assessment does not allow for ineffable processes, but this does not mean they do not exist, or that when Michael wrote ‘Cape’, learning was not happening. The black box of creation stays closed to the poet as much as to the reader; any poet will tell you that. This is not a teacher conspiracy, or snobbery; it is the way writing is. Nor is it a concealment. Writing is not a hidden process; it is merely a mysterious one. And it is mysterious only because it is complex; because it encompasses not just many processes of the mind, but those processes interacting with the collective mind, with literature and poetry.
So, no, it does not unpack easily. But there is no need to unpack a box
when it is so well filled with the black stuff called, in Spanish, duende: the best thing to do with such a box and such blackness is to admire it and perhaps copy it. Michael didn’t need formative assessment in the shape of a net of words to help him write the next poem. The poem itself was the words; the poem itself was formative. Summative assessment – that was brilliant, Michael; you went well beyond yourself, Michael; we really love that poem, Michael – is what is called for here, and then perhaps another poem, to form his writing further.
But even the best, most risk-taking teachers, such as Linda and my other school colleagues, will have trouble fitting another poem into the school curriculum. The formative assessment movement has pushed the curriculum towards ever more strands and categories of writing, and towards ‘skills’ which have to be acquired and ticked off lists: not just ‘prose’, but ‘non-fictional prose’, ‘transactional prose’, ‘business prose’. Then, because good writing is in practice very similar across genres, and because rich writing is hard to strand, teachers are pushed towards extreme and thin examples of each of these genres. This is how the English lesson becomes the History lesson, a soggy one, and thousands of Year 7s across the country have sat down this year not with poems but with Wikipedia entries and ship maps, to commence a ‘non-fictional writing unit on the Titanic’, after which they have been deemed to gain certain ‘non-fictional writing skills’, ticked off a long and complicated list. Though generally, they haven’t, for as surely as the rich text of a poem breeds another rich text, the thin text of the Wiki entry breeds a thin one. And that is how, too, the prospect of reading a poem to kids and letting them write one in response has become a dangerous activity, one to make an idealistic young English teacher weep with fear.
In my dreams, I write a giant, all-purpose WALT for the English corridor. The banner reads: We are learning to write by reading and to read by writing. I have the words embroidered on yards of silk, and artfully pinned from Miss H’s classroom to Miss P’s like bunting, arching prettily over the loos in the middle.