When I facilitate poetry workshops I like to start by asking what is interesting or weird in what we’ve just read.
I bring Rebecca Parry’s A Guide to Love in Icelandic to a class of teenagers at Swan School. “There are certain risks in co-operative living,” it runs, “warmth, gravitational laws, the sticky sun.”
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ says a student, ‘the sun isn’t sticky’. He isn’t annoyed by this. He is merely pointing out the error. We talk through what the words ‘sticky sun’ might be doing. Yes, you’re right, it doesn’t make sense. Maybe the poem’s asking us to try and work it out. What does it make us imagine? How would we feel about a sticky sun? We dig into the image. ‘It doesn’t make sense’ is a phrase that comes up often for students, even in relation to parts of poems that they liked or enjoyed.
Looking for poems to bring to young people makes me read in a completely different way. I find myself trying to work out whether something is a ‘Swan School poem’. Does it make enough sense? Does it tackle the world with imagination? Does it sidestep last week’s complaint that poems get boring because they’re always about romance and the things that lie in people’s hearts? Does the poem know how to play?
And once I’m in the room, brandishing poems, will I be able to do something better than explain it? Will I be able to open it up to their enjoyment? Reading this way contributes to one of the crucial lessons poets must learn: to encounter and admire work beyond one’s own taste. I might favour poems with surreal turns, or that examine what lies in people’s hearts, and sometimes these are the ones I bring with me. But other times I need to bring something with an impressive clarity of meaning, or about spaceships, and in doing so, I realise that of course it is possible and exciting to write in those ways too.
About half way through the term, I went to a ‘facilitators on facilitation’ group at Oxford Poetry Library, where about eight regular workshop facilitators got together to discuss methods and challenges. One participant said ‘you have to be relaxed,’ and I immediately became aware of all the moments when I was not relaxed in workshops. If you are not relaxed then there is something you are resisting and you risk being resisted in turn. Resistance, in this context, is to let your worry or insecurity stop you from engaging with what is in front of you. Perhaps you are resisting the student who says they can think of nothing to write. Perhaps you are resisting the fact that people have clearly finished writing before you had planned. Perhaps you are resisting the possibility you will be misunderstood and are therefore speaking more than you need to. If you are relaxed, you are no less engaged, no less present, but you offer those participating more of a chance to flow with you.
I am continually learning to be relaxed. While I like to bear a group’s needs in mind, I know that holding onto my perception of what these might be too tightly will lead to flat, restricted poem choices, whereas bringing something that challenges them, that prods and dares, creates possibility. After that meeting, I chose to be more relaxed about the ‘it doesn’t make sense’ issue the next time I went into that class. Doing so led to my favourite, and I think, most productive session of the term (which I privately called ‘making sense’).
The sense problem was really symptomatic of a bigger problem, which is the preconceptions we each have as to what a poem should be. As with pretty much any ‘problem’ you’ll encounter in a poetry workshop, it isn’t a problem a particular group or person is having, but one of the essential challenges of poetry. We are all cluttered with ideas of how to write and how to create what is seen as a good poem, or even a poem at all.
There can be a tendency toward rhyme and a limitation of subject matter to what a person feels is ‘allowed’, often leading to generalism, lines like ‘Loving you makes the world end/ the earth shatter and the skies bend’, that try, flatly, to describe some essential truth. Generalism has a place in poetry but I suspect it may be extremely hard to write well.To tackle this in workshops, I used exactly the same tool I would use to move through it in my own writing: constraints. Constraints push us to more unusual word choices, more surprising imagery, and it’s these surprises that do the poem-ing: reacquainting us with the idea of the poem, and therefore, opening us to experience it more intensely than before
In this case, we ran phrases and lyrics through Google Translate, via Finnish, Basque, Afrikaans, and back into English. ‘My loneliness is killing me’ became ‘My deep anxiety is killing me’. ‘I love cookies and apple pie’ remained unchanged. It seemed to achieve the aim: allowing and enjoying strangeness. It also showed students the missing route from the original sense to its defamiliarising translation into poetry: Taylor Swift’s ‘oh, your sweet disposition/and my wide-eyed gaze’ became ‘oh, your sweet attitude/and my big eyes’.
We then moved to look at an ee. cummings poem which stood somewhere at the outer reaches of what it’s possible to make meaning of. We took handfuls of magnetic poetry, finding sense and shape in unexpected places, freed from our own expectations of what words we should write. The student who had pointed out the senselessness of the sticky sun started his poem with ‘my exploding sister…’. Lastly, we looked at a Sappho fragment and tried some erasure poetry, thinking about what new sense might emerge from the disruption of an original, sensible text. Very beautiful, very strange poems arose - about nature, emotion, potatoes. A ‘Swan School poem’, ultimately, was the kind of poem we all seek - one we feel able to get our teeth into.
We talk a lot about why creative writing in schools might be important. Any creative practitioner these days needs to be able to make a case for how their art-form can support the curriculum and develop student’s skills. An answer that I would probably not suggest to a school, but which I have thought more and more about as the term has gone on, is that it is important to embrace what doesn’t make sense. Things that don’t make sense aren’t always something to be dismissed, can in fact be a deeply enriching challenge. If we stick to what makes sense we stay narrow, confined to what has been expressed before, been understood, absorbed, repeated. We are afraid of senselessness, its unruliness, but it’s at the outposts of sense that we make discoveries about ourselves, others, and the world. A good piece of writing advice that I was once given was to try and put the secret, the strange thing no one else will understand into your poem. Often, this is the thing that people will connect with most deeply, because in working to understanding it they are able to access new sense - meaning that did not exist as fully for them before.
We ended the term by looking at rituals - coming up with instructions for real or imagined rituals. Each student wrote the first line of their ritual, and then we made a ‘secret santa’ of first lines, everyone picking out of a hat (thank you to Penny, my co-facilitator, for that one!). Once again, everyone was constrained by the first step they had been given, asked to move in a direction other than their default. The students seemed readier for the unsolved, readier to make mysteries of these instructions. Reading their poems, we were asked to blow out a candle, to call a friend’s name, to walk in a circle, to sing a song ‘that won’t matter in the end’, and to let the wind take us away from home.
Maya Little, February 2025
