February 2006 - Sunday Times of India

ARTICLE FROM Sunday Times of India, Mumbai - 12/02/06
JOURNALIST - Ronita Torcato

Poetry (and Horn) Ok Please

Poets of yore were said to ride into battle chanting encouragement to their side, hurling incantations at the enemy, for a curse was a dangerous weapon. Friday evening in the garden of the David Sassoon Library, we are in a literary paradise. The Times of India Kala Ghoda Arts Festival gives us something to be happy about; for it boasts one of the largest assemblies of poets, senior and new, reading from the page, or in performance, parlaying their talent.

So, there we were, held in thrall by John Agard as he weaved words and magic inspired by nature, maths, science, society. One of the UK's top performance poets, Agard (and Imtiaz Dharker and Shamshad Khan) are being hosted by the British Council for readings in collaboration with the KGF folks. At the Sassoon Lib and Prithvi Theatre, they were joined by Adil Jussawalla, Eunice de Souza, Ranjit Hoskote, Jerry Pinto, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Menka Shivdasani, CP Surendran, Marilyn Noronha, Sampurna Chatterji, Anju Makhija and Revathy Gopal.

Imtiaz read a poem from her collection I speak for the Devil as well as poems about exile, journeys and religious strife, lamenting in a poem that her "God has been given a devil's face". Eunice's poems were nostalgic, referencing her youth, family, Goa, and her students (she was head of the Dept of English at St Xavier's College). Adil did a deft, gentlemanly reading of powerful words, finishing by threatening to send a copy of his poems to... the beetles which kept falling on our head. Ranjit read the beautiful Effects of Distance (my favourite poem, which happened to be dedicated to his wife). Jerry amused and entertained the audience, reading and emceeing with his usual savvy.

Actually, most of the poets were interesting but it was the rasta-haired Agard who mesmerised us all. (The snazzy jackets the male poets wore didn't hurt either). With Valentine's Day round the corner, Agard made us laugh with his account of the romance between a pair of hippopotamuses. He also explored issues of race and identity and religion, always casting a humourous eye on the human condition. One poem had a verse that went: 'So what if we are Muslim or Hindu/ we all eat the same aloo'.

In "Horn Please" and another poem, he had the audience participating with a chorus shouted in unison. An entertainer par excellence, Agard, is thoughtful and insightful. He read a poem from his 1997 Bloodaxe publication, From the Devil's Pulpit giving the devil's point of view. Sweeping from Genesis across time, engaging with the world of myth, metaphysics, theology, politics and the arts - not to speak of cricket - Agard takes a leaf out of John Milton and Marie Corelli to make Lucifer a bawdy, witty, sophisticated shape-shifter and sex-switcher. Is Agard the devil's advocate? Nyet. His Satanic verses succeed in eradicatig fear of the Old Tempter who thrives on lies. Pardon me if this piece seems to be all about Agard, but his voice overshadowed the others, at this movable feast, which makes living in Mumbai in the wintertime such a pleasure

February 2006 - TES.

ARTICLE FROM TES - 24/02/06 JOURNALIST - Wendy Wallace

It's alive!

Poetry isn't dead. Far from it. With oral sex and the Paddington rail crash feeding the imagery, six poets give unflinching live performances in front of hundreds of GCSE pupils. Wendy Wallace reports

Who said poetry was dead? "Long live poetry" was the message from thousands of London teenagers this month.

Daisy Goodwin, a poetry pundit and television presenter, has complained that poetry is on the way to extinction, with book sales down and few people able to name today's top 10 poets. "It will be like Morris dancing: really interesting to people who do it, and incomprehensible and slightly annoying to people who don't," she has said.

Well, it doesn't feel like that in the cavernous space of the Shaftesbury Theatre on a Friday just before half-term, where 1,250 Year 11 students are gathered to hear not one poet but six as part of the GCSEPoetry Live! national tour. Under the rococo splendour of the Shaftesbury's gilded mouldings, a hum of excitement rises from teenagers from 22 schools. As presenter Tony Childs, chief examiner of the AQA exam board, introduces poet Gillian Clarke's "beautiful body of work", two boys behind me are discussing another kind of beautiful body. But the auditorium falls silent to hear Gillian Clarke talk about her poem "Catrin".

"This poem is dead on the page until it has a reader," she tells them.

"Every single word has a public meaning that can be looked up in the dictionary. But every one of us has a thousand different experiences of our own to bring to each word. You don't need a teacher or a poet to tell you all that there is in a poem. You must have your own courage."

Gillian Clarke reads poems about a daughter growing away ("the tight, red rope of love which we both fought over"), about Bosnia ("the air stammering with gunfire") and the Paddington rail crash ("Darling, I'm on the train") to a storm of enthusiasm. Asked, "Why do you like poetry?", she says that "a poet will have said something about all human feeling. Somewhere, there is a poem that will meet your mood."

Carmen Bronfield, 15, from Hampstead school in north London is impressed.

"She kept it really simple and short and it was easier to understand," she says.

As well as Gillian Clarke, the day's programme includes Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Imtiaz Dharker, the young Kurdish poet Choman Hardi and John Agard, five of whom are featured in AQA's GCSE anthology.

On stage, the poets are performers as well as readers of their own work.

Carol Ann Duffy is unfazed when asked, "What is the imagery behind 'diving for pearls'?" in her love poem "Anne Hathaway". "It's an image of oral sex between lovers." The hall is suitably thrilled. The previous week, she had amazed another teen audience when, on being asked if she hated all men, she walked over and kissed Tony Childs. Accused by one pupil of "reading in an expressionless way", she folds her arms and, after a poet's pause, asks, "Am I bothered?"

Simon Armitage, at pains to indicate to the youngsters that it isn't long since he was one of them, goes down brilliantly and prompts a slew of questions from boys. "He tried to talk to the kids more," says 16-year-old Fati Zeiour of Hampstead school. "He made more jokes." Fati likes poems that rhyme, and only those that rhyme.

Simon Armitage's popularity is confirmed by Janet Saloman, head of English at Warwick boys' school in Waltham Forest. "Our boys were saying afterwards that 'Simon Armitage is our favourite poet now'." Does she feel that poetry risks becoming extinct in national culture? "I think it's nonsense. I teach in north-east London in a boys' comprehensive and they love their poetry.

You have to approach it in the right way, but it's tied in with the music they like - the rhythm of poetry is just inside them." With a high proportion of needy pupils, Janet Saloman appreciates getting grants to cover the Pounds 12.50 ticket costs from gifted and talented funds and the Aim Higher scheme to encourage those who would not normally consider university.

Simon Armitage has been involved in Poetry Live! for seven years. "As a writer, what you want is an audience," he says. At school at a comprehensive in West Yorkshire he studied "dead poets", but then heard Ted Hughes reading his work at a cinema in Hebden Bridge. "I still remember how that made things alive and memorable," he says. He shrugs off the notion that poetry is dead. "It's a dissenting art form. It'll always be somewhere in the margins."

A few miles away, in Westminster Hall, 2,300 more teenagers are seeing the same poets; the poets shuttle between the two venues. "Poetry is not dead,"

says Poetry Live organiser Simon Powell. "Kids concentrate brilliantly and ask such interesting questions - which get better and better - about the process of writing poetry."

John McIntyre, head of English at the Sylvia Young theatre school, has been bringing students to the events for five years. "There is a wonderful rapport between the poets and the students," he says. "Students can see the poets' tone of voice, rhythm, body language, eye contact. It's just a pity not every student can have the opportunity."

Further information and bookings: www.poetrylive.net; tel 01745 814214

March 2005 - Telegraph

ARTICLE FROM SATURDAY TELEGRAPH - 19/03/05 JOURNALIST - ALEXANDRA BUXTON

Top poets reading aloud at an all-day event are a hit with pupils, says Alexandra Buxton

Theatres are at their most unglamorous in the cold light of day, and the Shaftesbury in the West End of London is usually no exception. But, this morning, the huge building is buzzing with life. Around 1,500 teenagers from schools all over the South-East are pouring in through the swing doors and finding their seats in the dimly-lit, rococo auditorium.

These pupils - some in uniform, others in jeans and hoodies, many from ethnic minorities - are here for Poetry Live, a day-long event aimed at GCSE students that puts some of our leading poets before a live audience. Today's line-up ranges from Gillian Clarke, many of whose lyrical poems are set in rural Wales, to Benjamin Zephaniah, the performance poet whose rap-style poems blend humour and anger.

Poetry Live events are held in 40 venues around England and reach some 70,000 pupils each year. They are based on the AQA exam board's English syllabus, which is taken by two-thirds of schools. All but two of the nine poets taking part have their work published in the AQA poetry anthology, which all pupils are given at school.

Poetry Live was started, not by a grandiose government initiative, but by Simon Powell, an A-level lecturer in Lancashire. "In the late 1980s, a colleague and I decided to run our own event for A-level sociology students after taking groups to sixth-form conferences where academics spoke over their heads," says Powell. "At that first event we needed to attract 600 students to break even and 5,000 wanted to come."

The company that ran A-level conferences was sold. But, because he enjoys poetry, Powell hung on to Poetry Live, which is run from a tiny office in north Wales. It receives no grants or subsidies; pupils pay £11 each for the chance to hear six poets read and discuss their work. "Our idea is very straightforward - that the event should, literally, bring poetry alive," says Powell.

Inside the Shaftesbury Theatre, there is an air of barely suppressed anarchy as rows of pupils scuffle and rustle, tap into their mobiles and open up lunch boxes. Many of the students are here on sufferance: they find poetry boring and impenetrable; they think poets are stuffy and stuck-up. Many are likely to find little connection between Gillian Clarke's references to sheep and hayfields and their own urban lives.

Yet Clarke manages to hold their attention with an extraordinary sense of calm and depth. She reads Catrin, a poem that links the struggle of the birth of her daughter to the mother-daughter struggle of the teenage years, and a poem called Cold Knap Lake, which begins:

We once watched a crowd pull a drowned child from the lake. Blue-lipped and dressed in water's long green silk she lay for dead…

For this London audience, the stars of the show are the black poets, Benjamin Zephaniah, Grace Nichols and John Agard, whose work demands to be spoken aloud. There are storms of applause as Zephaniah reads his playfully witty poem, In the Library. Unlike some of the other poets, he doesn't stand at the podium but strides around the stage, relying on memory and thrilling the young listeners with his spontaneity. "That Benjamin guy," says one pupil later. "He's cool."

Meghann Ali, a lecturer in English at Uxbridge College, has brought a group of pupils to Poetry Live for the first time. "Hearing the poets reading their work aloud gives students a wonderful sense of the rhythm and beat of poetry - something they might not grasp so easily from the printed page," she says. "Being told by poets like Simon Armitage how their work came about, and what lies behind it, also brings the work alive."

Though Poetry Live is fun, it is also focused on the coming exams. During the day, there are two short talks from an examiner on the importance of answering the question properly and planning what to write. Studies have shown that only a few pupils make a plan and that many underachieve. Typically, pupils write down everything they know about a poem and then, with a few minutes to spare, begin to address the question.

In the coffee break, several teachers remark that pupils don't need any more lectures on how to tackle exams. However, Theodore, a pupil at Sacred Heart RC School in Camberwell, disagrees. "It's useful to hear that you have to support what you write with references to the text and to be told how you need to stick to the task," he says.

Participants leave with a Poetry Life booklet that includes poems, commentaries and biographical notes, plus details of the poets' websites. Many invite online questions and comments from readers.

Clarke believes that the study of contemporary poetry is about much more than simply getting another GCSE. "It's about humanity. Studying poetry is a wonderful opportunity for engaging young people and encouraging them to communicate. We all need more poetry in our lives, not less," she says.

• For more information on GCSE Poetry Live, phone 01745 814214 or see www.poetrylive.net.

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