“Sir, I don’t always understand poetry,” one of the boys laments in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, only to be met with this response from his teacher: “I never understand it.” Poetry is so often presented as a precise code to be deciphered, with only the correct interpretation allowed on an exam paper, that it’s no wonder most people continue to feel intimidated by it well into adulthood. At the Children’s Books Ireland conference on September 12/13th, spoken word poets made a compelling case for performance as key to making poetry accessible to young people.
Steven Camden, aka Polarbear, is well known in the UK as a spoken word poet, and performed in Dublin last year as part of Lingo, Ireland’s first spoken-word festival (running again this year October 16th-18th). “I didn’t really know what I was doing till I was doing it,” he recalls when asked about when he began writing poetry. For him, he was trying to figure something out for himself: “then other people said they were poems.” The stories, often about his own teenage years, that he told in this way didn’t connect with what he’d been taught poetry was.
Aisling Fahey, London’s current Young Poet Laureate, had a similar story: writing for her is a way of figuring things out, of discovering what you’re thinking. She adds that you end up “revealing even more when you’re speaking to people”, that the performance adds another layer to the work. People bring their own experiences to the table, too: “you’re telling your truth, or a version of your truth”, but a particular line can spark something for them that an author didn’t intend.
For Fahey, it’s a slightly strange experience being asked to speak – and perform – with Polarbear at this conference. She was first introduced to poetry slams as a teenager, when he was one of the poets who came to her school to deliver workshops. She recalls sneaking into pubs at 14 to perform at open mic nights, as well as more formal support in the form of the Barbican Young Poets workshop and community. “When you get to about 25 a lot of support cuts off,” she notes, adding that she’s now the one delivering workshops rather than taking them.
“It’s strange to see it flipped,” she notes, but both she and Camden speak passionately about their own teaching experience. “I have most ideas when I’m around other people, especially younger people,” Camden notes, while Fahey says, “I definitely feel most alive in workshop sessions”. Poetry in this context offers young people a space to do something fun and to explore what matters to them. “You get to see their personalities,” Fahey adds, in this space that is outside of the typical school environment.
There is an unwritten but invariably adhered-to rule about all discussions about performance poetry, and this occasion is no exception. The question is raised about performance poetry versus written poetry, stage versus page. Is there still a place for the written word in this brave new world? For Camden, who has also written young adult novels, the main difference for him was that “a book is bigger” – but the feeling of it being spoken, of it sounding like a character, remained. Fahey notes that it was only through spoken word that she figured out “what poetry can do”, and then applied that to the page. “It’s a different language in a way – we need to equip people with the tools to understand it.” And the two are not in competition – Camden is more concerned with representing a wider range of voices and poetic examples than with pitting performance poetry against its print siblings.
When they perform their work at the conference, there is silence and electricity: for a few minutes everyone in the room wants to be a poet. It doesn’t feel like poetry as it’s taught in school. It’s immediate. Writing an essay on it with the correct interpretation might be tricky, but there’s something real and compelling about the words spilling out that feels as though understanding it in that way perhaps isn’t the point at all.
Claire Hennessy is the author of several YA novels and is currently Artist in Residence at the Church of Ireland College of Education.
