Build a Poem

I run a fair amount of poetry workshops. A lot of the time these are for people with little of no experience of writing poetry.

I start every workshop with a request I once heard Billy Collins make. “Please take down the poetry deflection shield that was installed at school”.

It’s true that people have many misconceptions about poetry. Often these misunderstandings can halt their engagement with poetry permanently. Which, as a lover of the form, is a travesty. What can anyone do to overcome this enduring resistance to the form?

For a start, you can remind people how the tricks poetry rountinely pulls off are already in every day use. When I describe my best friend Bill as “a live wire”, am I really saying this burly former rugby player is just like a dangerously exposed electrical cable? Nope, but you do immediately understand what my friend Bill is probably like. Or when I say my Mum was my rock, does that mean she was a large, impassive block of granite. No, again we get the picture.

I like what Don Paterson said about poetry. “If you concentrate the language, the result will seem poetic.” That’s useful to mention too.

Though in all honesty, despite providing these reassurances, we are still left with the formidable and intimidating blankness of an empty page in front of the workshop participants.

One way to overcome this is to deconstruct the writing process.

When I teach “Build a Poem”, the analogy I use is lego. In this case, words are the bricks used to assemble lines of poetry. I provide the pegboard onto which the lego bricks are placed and the design they will follow when it is time to assemble a line.

People are already really good with words. They have their own unique store of them. So what is needed is a set of prompts that will help them to unearth the best they’ve got. All the words get placed in a pile on an empty page. They are sorted into colours and shapes, or nouns, adjectives and concepts.

Then in a further series of prompts they assemble the words into short sentences. The design provides the framework for a poem, written line by line.

Frequently I find the resulting poems to be suprisingly moving. The choices people make about word choices are totally original, so despite working to a tight structure, everyone’s poem is totally original. People are often shocked by what they’ve written, most of the time in a good way.

I have used this approach with five and six year old school children and loved watching them reveal their insights and fresh approach to language. I’ve also used it in conferences, recently running a workshop with four hundred delegates. In this case, the task was to empower delegates to explore what great, successful team working is like and to imagine the outcomes this would deliver to their customers.

I believe poetry has a unique ability to be self-revalatory. To put into words a dimly understood impression. The results can be delightful or they can be unwelcome. Most of the time they are true.

Poetry really should be taught in school, but maybe not solely as literature. Maybe the greater function would be to position it as thinking tool, as a self-counsellor and healer, as a guide and as a best friend.