Poetry Friday- How Do We Inspire Young Poets?

How do you inspire young poets?

Poetry Podcast No.2.

This is the second instalment of a recent discussion I shared with Corinne Kaplan, an educator with a passion for literacy. We had the opportunity to sit and discuss what inspires young poets. It formed part of the Arts Learning Festival conducted by the Independent Schools of Victoria.

In this episode, we discuss how you encourage young poets to find inspiration. Think small: their own treasures and the objects, the things around them.

And what if they can’t find the right word? Well, it’s perfectly okay to make one up…

If you are willing to stay with us until the end, I will share two of my poems from the recently published anthology, 'What the Poemster Found'.

Arts Learning Festival · Poetry Podcast Part 2

The Words That Come At Night

Sometimes

The words of unwritten poems

Slide into bed next to me

They nestle on my pillow

And whisper in my ear

Write me down

-Remember me

In tomorrow’s early light

Soft echoes at the edge of sleep

Implore me to

Commit to memory

Sweet refrains and edgy fragments

These faint murmurings

These wannabe words of unwritten poems

Settle as cobweb fine

Final thoughts

Last visitors

Before sleep swallows the room.

Alan j Wright, 'What The Poemster Found.'

Where Does My Poetry Hide?

Where does my poetry hide?

It snuggles in snatches of conversations

floating down the street

It rocks about in my collected treasures

Junky and jumbled

I look for it in lettuce, limes and lemons

In asparagus, apples, even anchovies

It might be sealed a packet of peppermints

A jar of peanut butter

Escaping with aromatic intensity

Poetry washes up on the shoreline

in clusters of seashells

Glittering sea glass

Seaweed and wet sand

I seek it out in a song’s refrain

And voices in a playground

I find it nestling in my favourite books

It emerges in isolated words

-and fabulous fragments

Angry and otherwise

It swirls in the mumbles and whispers rumbling

against the internal walls of houses.

It develops in photographs that magically reveal my history

Poetry soothes me in sonorous voices on the radio

And thunders at me on stormy mornings

I can spot it in a day old newspaper article

Or a marescent autumn leaf

Poetry reveals itself in a small child’s eyes

It announces itself in simple pleasures,

Or recollections of days long past

It is minute like smidgens and skerricks

Things barely seen or blown to smithereens

It is immense like boulders, bridges and reservoirs

I hear poetry in the morning carols of magpies

I wake each day knowing it’s out there

waiting for me to discover its hiding spots

-Coming, ready or not!

Alan j Wright, 'What The Poemster Found.'

Poetry Inspired by Images and Objects

There are many ways pictures and photographs can be conscripted to support the writing of poetry. Allow me to share a few ideas with you: Old photographs are a great source of inspiration. Cynthia Rylant explored this idea with great success in her book 'Something Permanent' where she employed the Depression era photographs of Walker Evans to add a new voice to the starkness to the lives of people experienced under extreme circumstances. I have used this strategy to spark many individual poems. In ' I Bet There's No Broccoli On The Moon,' I used a photo I had taken in 2004 while living in New York to inspire a poem. The poem was based on a story related by a friend who grew up in New York. I regularly combined poetry and pictures in my writer's notebook, drawing on inspiration from the photograph and my personal memories. We can also utilize existing cartoons and illustrations to create ekphrastic poems. I frequently use the illustrations of Jim Pavlidis to co...

Peter Dixon -Teabag Poem

Today I'm highlighting the poetry of Peter Dixon. Peter Dixon was not just a poet. He was a performer, educationalist and artist. He grew up in London during WW2, and as a boy his schooling was far from successful. He struggled with spelling and the understanding of word, form and grammar, so he tended to write secretly at home, drawing and writing of things largely ignored by schools. Despite this difficult phase of his life, Peter eventually became a school teacher and then a senior lecturer in education. It often mystified him as to how all of this came to pass. As a teacher, he strived to be unbiased and did not neglect the children who experienced learning challenges. Peter Dixon became a full time children’s writer and educational consultant. His first book was published in 1978. Whilst living in Winchester, Hampshire, with his family, he contributed to over 100 poetry anthologies and had seven collections of his own work published including Grow Your O...

Poetry Friday 'Storm On The Island' Seamus Heaney

Given the fact that we recently celebrated St Patrick's Day, it seems appropriate that I take this opportunity to continue the Irish focus and recognize one of Ireland's leading literary figures... Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland in 1939 and died in 2013. He became a multi award winning poet. His first collection of poems, 'Death of a Naturalist' appeared in 1966 and helped to establish Heaney as one of the major poets of the 20th century. From that first anthology, I have chosen 'Storm On The Island.' This poem tells us about the stoic resistance of people and structures to an incoming storm. The island is not named. Poetic scholars believe this is a poem that can be taken literally, as a monologue on the life and attitude of island people facing a storm, or it can be understood as a metaphor of political struggle on the island of Ireland. Heaney knew both worlds. The poems of this first collection are grounded in the soil...

Linda Mitchell8 May 2020 at 23:11
Alan, one of those silver linings of this time is that I have a bit more time to listen to a podcast. This was a really delightful chat. I'm an educator who looks for ways of brining poetry to student readers and writers. Thank you!
And, the idea of ideas for poetry in your poem above are so fun. They really do slide into bed next to me. Ha!
Michelle Heidenrich Barnes9 May 2020 at 01:31
I remember those same caroling magpies singing their poetry to me when I lived in Australia. :) Thank you for sharing this interesting conversation and your delightful poems, Alan!
Mary Lee9 May 2020 at 22:59
LOVE the poems! One of the benefits of distance teaching/learning is that I can toss out invitations that have no strings attached. These are perfect ways to remind students that poetry is always within their reach!
Sally Murphy12 May 2020 at 16:15
This podcast is excellent - I'll be sharing with my teaching students. And, as always your poems are excellent too. I love: "I wake each day knowing it’s out there
waiting for me to discover its hiding spots".

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