Molly Naylor on how poetry comes alive

It pains me to tell you that when I was eight years old, I performed a rap about the environment in my school assembly. I don’t remember how it went down with the audience, but as a tiny white Cornish girl with a Lego fringe and a loose understanding of cadence, I think we can safely assume that my performance didn’t blow minds. “You gotta think green, yeah!” I implored my audience. “You gotta feel green, yeah! You gotta be green, yeeeeeeah.” Mic drop, and I was out of there. I’m cringing as I write this.

I suppose this was the first ‘poem’ I ever wrote. I did not positively improve the world with this piece of work, but to be fair to me I wasn’t trying to. It did not enrich me either; we’d been asked to write a poem about the environment and so that’s what I did. It was inauthentic and played mostly for laughs. Later, I re-discovered poetry and found it to be an art form that had the power and potency to be both personally enriching and socially engaged. This journey began with my mum giving me a Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze collection for Christmas, which I loved. Then in Year Six, a friend’s dad took us to see Henry Normal perform his poems at the local Arts Centre and I loved that too.

By the time I arrived at secondary school, I was looking forward to writing and reading poems in English classes. I quickly found, however, that poetry in this context wasn’t what I’d hoped it might be. Whenever poetry was on the agenda, our job, it turned out, was to read the poems, annotate them in line with our teacher’s analysis of them and then attempt to point out the various ‘language features’. Simile, check. Imagery, check. Metaphor, check. This process felt arduous, pointless, and frustrating. What was the point of someone explaining to me what Seamus Heaney or John Donne was attempting to say? How would de-coding and analysing bafflingly dense works of literature help me to read other work, or write my own? As an adult, I of course appreciate how exploring other people’s work can improve one’s craft, but at the time I couldn’t make that connection while working with the material we were being given. I adore Heaney now, but at fourteen, I couldn’t relate to it and just felt like I was getting it wrong. As for John Donne, I must admit that he’s still a mystery to me. Please don’t get in touch to explain why he’s good.

Cut to later in my life, where I have become, amongst other things, a poet. I suspect this development happened despite those protracted excavations in English class rather than because of them; I put it down to a variety of factors including the Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze book gifted by mum, that Henry Normal performance, then later seeing Aisle 16 at Glastonbury and hearing Lemn Sissay on Radio 4.

As my poetry career developed, I began to be invited into schools to deliver workshops to students. The first time I was asked to do this I felt honoured. I quickly developed an idea about myself as an inspirational figure. This image dissolved abruptly on my first day as workshop facilitator, when I was tasked with helping thirty fourteen-year-olds write poems on the theme of the First World War. “So, what makes a good poem?” I asked them as an opener. I was met with sighs, eye rolls, and blank faces. Eventually, a student stuck their hand up.

“Fronted adverbials?” they said. I was gripped with panic. I had no idea what these words meant, so I tried to style it out.

“Er… yes, and could you remind the group, in case anyone has forgotten, what fronted adverbials… are?”

The student shrugged and stared out of the window. To this day, I don’t know that a fronted adverbial is, or whether it would improve a poem. Again, no need to get in touch to explain.

In short, the session was a bust. The more diligent students churned out some verses about the trenches and read them out in monotones without looking up from their paper. I tried to up my game next time, but it was tough. Schools often had a specific agenda in terms of the outcomes of sessions. The teachers were hampered by the constrictions of the National Curriculum and the types of poems it dictated students worked with. “We’ve been looking at the War Poets”, they’d say, or “We’re doing stuff about the seasons, so could you tie it in with that?” or once, horrifically, ‘Could the theme of their poems be ‘our school values’’?

A lot of the teachers I met loved poetry and were passionate about getting their students to engage with it. They believed in its power to enrich and galvanise. I liked how some of them didn’t want to patronise the students by assuming that they wouldn’t ‘get it’, but I thought back to myself at that age and how, despite being a bright and naturally academic student, I definitely didn’t get it. Often, I was invited into schools to support work already being done, but sometimes my role was to be sort of generally inspiring and provide a session that enhanced creativity. I struggled with this the most because the students’ preconceptions were strong. Most of them saw poetry as something hard and boring, and me bouncing in for a day wasn’t going to change that. Then, one spring, while visiting my parents back in Cornwall, I found something that shifted my approach.

My mum asked me to sort through some boxes of my old things. As I rifled through to see if anything wanted salvaging, I came across reams of notebooks full of my teenage poetry. I’d forgotten I’d been so prolific at that age. I sat on the floor in my old bedroom and read about my teenage struggles: my pain; my longings; my petty concerns. The trauma of friendships ending; the crushing rejection by a first love. There were no comedy environmental raps; this was pure feeling and authentic expression, incredibly personal and 100% autobiographical. Memories flooded in. The specific pain of adolescence, the relief of writing through that pain, hunched in bed with my notebook, then later sharing poems with close friends in moments of intimacy and connection.

These poems and my approach to creating them laid the foundation for the way I write now (although I like to think I’ve improved a bit). I write about a wider range of subjects, but my work often remains rooted in first-person narratives. My first professionally produced work (shout out to Apples and Snakes and the National Centre for Writing) was a live literature show about my experience of the London bombings. Through mentoring from Sarah Ellis, Courttia Newland and Francesca Beard I learned how to take a personal story and transform it into something more broadly relatable and socially, politically and philosophically engaged. I still write for relief, to better understand pain, to process trauma and to metabolise suffering; it’s a tool I use alongside others to preserve good mental health, and I’m repeatedly grateful that I have it at my disposal.

After discovering those old poems, I decided to see what happened when I asked teenagers to write from an autobiographical perspective. I started with some examples, deciding to use video instead of text, as printouts seemed to add to their apathy. I remember the first time I showed a group the poem Jessica by Polarbear (Steven Camden). I was more nervous than usual that day, worried they’d see through my attempts to win them over or worse, think that I was trying to be cool. But I didn’t need to win them over, because Polarbear did that for me. The students watched in silence, transfixed. We talked about the poem afterwards, and the room was animated. They had opinions, they felt connections, they could relate to the material. “But it’s not a poem”, someone said, and I asked them what had made them say that. “Cause it’s like… easy”, they said. I thought about John Donne and I knew what they meant. I could see how it was easy compared to that. But is easy bad? I reassured them that yes, Jessica was definitely a poem, and together we found some other words for easy (and better words for that poem) such as direct, accessible, relatable, funny.

Poetry written solely or partially for performance became my new go-to in terms of the material I showed students from that point onwards, most of it autobiographical. I showed them Holly McNish, Inua Ellams, Sean Mahoney and Zia Ahmed. I got them to write about things they cared about in voices that felt like their own. I gave them permission to start from a place that felt easy, and then build from there.

This is the way I’ve continued to facilitate. The work produced ranges from funny and profound to indulgent and clichéd, but it’s nearly always appealingly authentic, with a confessional courage at its core. I have wondered at times if there is something too introspective or indulgent about working like this. Don’t we need art to work a bit harder? Don’t we need this new generation to save the world? To walk us back from climate apocalypse? How are they going to do that by writing about their crushes, their parents’ divorces, their friendships, their gender expression, their relationship with social media? I think I’ve landed on the belief that they’re not unrelated. Being useful in the world requires a solid core and a foundation of self-esteem and self-awareness. I think poetry and especially personal, autobiographical poetry can help with that. It did for me, and for many of my peers.

The Arts are under attack in this country. Funding is being cut, Arts degrees are being deemed as ‘low value’ and whole University departments are being shut down. I think it’s a huge problem that so many people consider Arts and Humanities subjects an indulgence and not a necessity. In Q & A sessions at schools, one student will invariably ask me how much money I make as a poet. I deflect, laughing over their heads with the teachers, all what are they like?! But it’s a solid question. I grew up in Blair’s Britain, believing I could do whatever I set my mind to. I was lucky. I had a mum who plied me with poetry at a young age, and then I moved to Norwich where rent was cheap and it was practically illegal to not be a poet.

A lot of secondary school students are necessarily worried about how they’re going to afford to live. Maybe none of them will grow up to be poets, much less autobiographical performance poets. But writing about myself helped me process pain, become more self-aware, express myself and move through difficult emotions; I need these skills every day of my adult life and I believe the students will too. Taking poetry into schools isn’t about encouraging them to grow up to be professional poets with undisclosed incomes, it’s about providing them with tools to live well. To be able to look inwards as a precursor to looking outwards, through relating to art that speaks directly about and to them. Give them the chance to save themselves and they might be better able to take a shot at saving the world.

I know there are a huge number of inspiring teachers and educators out there who can communicate the power of dense, complex poetry. I also know there are a huge number who feel frustrated at the material the Curriculum dictates they teach, and the way in which they’re required to teach it. Educators who’d rather navigate their own way through it, like I’m lucky to be able to, and in so doing have discovered that the only way it worked for me was when I started students off with work that felt relatable, accessible… easy. Work that wouldn’t make them feel bad for not understanding it. And you know, the ones that get really into it can always learn to appreciate John Donne in their own time. One of these days I might even do the same myself.

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Molly Naylor is a writer and performer. Her third poetry collection, Whatever You’ve Got, was published by Bad Betty Press. She also wrote the graphic novel Lights, Planets, People.

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From Magma 85, Poems for schools



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