Poetry for beginners

Could Fifty Strong, an anthology of 50 poems 'chosen by teenagers for teenagers', be the answer for teachers hoping to inspire their students? Sarah Crown investigates, with help from students-turned-reviewers Isabel Blake and Simon Bell
Fifty Strong
'The simple layout and colour scheme make this a thoroughly sophisticated book ... '

Poetry for beginners


Stick your head round the door of an English classroom before a poetry lesson, and the odds are you'll find the teacher, head in hands behind a wall of abandoned anthologies, racking their brains for a way to interest their charges in the joys of verse. If the profusion of festivals, workshops, public transport poems and Nation's Favourites is anything to go by, poetry in the UK is enjoying something of a purple patch - but the fact remains that students, on the whole, continue to shy away from it. Asked for their thoughts on poetry, a 2004 GCSE group described it as "intimidating", "elite", "irrelevant", even (whisper it) "boring". Post-GCSE, where students might be expected to show more enthusiasm for a subject they are studying voluntarily, there is little change. "Many students" admits King's College London head of English, Professor Ann Thompson, in Elaine Showalter's 2002 book, Teaching Literature, "don't like poetry very much."

But why not? Following a resurgence in poetry's popularity in the wake of 9/11, poet laureate Andrew Motion claimed in the Guardian that "poetry is the form we turn to instinctively at moments of intensity, whether it be to celebrate or to grieve." Since adolescence is essentially one long series of intense moments, it seems reasonable to assume that if there's one point in our lives when we might be receptive to poetry, it is then. "Poetry," said Robert Frost, "is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words." This ability of poems to give clear expression to the seemingly ineffable range of feelings that swamp us as teenagers - love, loneliness, anger, ennui - should make them invaluable tools for tackling the passage through puberty. Speaking from personal experience, WB Yeats's 'He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven', read while in the throes of 15-year-old passion, made such a deep impression on me that I ended up basing my masters thesis around his work.

For most of us though, our first taste of poetry is less inspiring. School curriculums are generally based on a heady mix of Shakespearean sonnets and the "What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?" school of poems that led Blackadder's squadron commander Lord Flashheart to declare "I'm sick of this damn war: the blood, the noise, the endless poetry." While there is nothing wrong with these poems per se, the fact is that they are chosen on the distinctly banal grounds of their perceived suitability for exam-based study. To interest teenagers in poetry, says Showalter, we should "encourage students to start with the poems which are most directly meaningful to them. With poetry, as with other genres, students must begin with the familiar and emotionally relevant, and move from there to more complex forms and historically different works."

And who better qualified to decide which poems teenagers are interested in reading than teenagers themselves? Such was the thinking behind the South Bank Centre's anthology, Fifty Strong. Following on from the success of their 2003 Fifty Fifty anthology, produced to mark the 50th birthday of their renowned Poetry Library, the South Bank Centre decided to compile a companion anthology for teenagers, over which the teenagers themselves would exercise editorial control. The result: an eclectic, engaging collection of 50 poems chosen by 50 teenagers, each with a brief explanatory note, stylishly presented in sleek, uncompromising black and white.

The book is divided into five themed sections, each compiled by a group of 10 teenagers from a different part of the UK. Every group was joined by a poet whose role it was to help them decide upon their theme and be on hand to oversee the selection process and provide advice or direction, should it be needed. According to Paul Summers, who worked with the group of students from King Edward IV High School in Morpeth, Northumberland, the idea was not so much to guide them towards particular poems as to make them aware of the breadth of the choice before them. "It was pretty much a case of me saying, have a look at as much as you can - new anthologies, old anthologies, stuff that you haven't seen at school," he says. "They ended up just pulling books off shelves and having a rummage around - it was very decadent." The diversity of the final selection, which includes, as Summers puts it, "everything from cathartic survivor stuff to the canon", he describes as "a happy accident ... I told them not to discriminate and just to have a look and see if anything appealed. I gave them a very long lead - and I think that worked."

Sinéad Morrissey, the poet who supervised the students from Methodist College Belfast, was also keen to emphasise their independence. "We brought them into the poetry library and just let them loose," she says. "It was absolutely random. I wanted it to be their editorial decision." In the end, though, she need not have worried; she couldn't have swayed the selection process even if had she wanted to. "I was kind of blown away by how passionate and enthusiastic they already were," she admits. "In the first session, I asked them if they thought it was important to have equal representation by male poets and female poets, and they were horrified at the thought, which I was very surprised by. In the end, lots of women were chosen, but the students were really certain that it was on the basis of the quality of the work. They knew their own minds, which was very impressive."

Finally, the acid test: now the process is over, will the students involved be hooked on poetry? "I think so," Summers says, thoughtfully. "I'm not sure that it'll have made them into natural-born purchasers of every poetry collection that comes out - I wouldn't blame them if it hadn't - but I certainly think it made them see that there is a much bigger world of poetry out there than they'd realised. The generic curse of the way poetry is delivered at secondary level these days is that it's about appreciation, not readership. The situation these kids found themselves in - three days to read with no pressure on them apart from having to make a few cups of coffee - was a privilege, a luxury. And I don't think it's one they'll forget." Morrissey agrees: "I think the students felt quite" - she hesitates - "liberated, in a way, by the fact that this was primarily an exercise in enthusiasm, not criticism. There was a power in going off the curriculum and not having to constantly consider and quantify that they responded to. It was really fresh. Hopefully the readers will feel that, too."

It looks as though they do. A copy of Fifty Strong has been sent out to every secondary school and sixth form college in the UK, and so far the responses have been resoundingly positive. Paul Summers thinks he knows why. "Without them being pushed, they covered everything - from domestic violence to bloody war in the former Yugoslavia to broken hearts and death," he says "That pretty much sums it up."

What our teenage reviewers thought

'A lively and absorbing collection'

There's a poem for every young person to relate to in Fifty Strong. This mature selection conveys powerful emotions while covering a broad range of topics including love, death, war and adoption. I particularly liked the use of poems from other languages and cultures and found it interesting to see them written in their original tongue.

The advantage of having a poetry anthology selected by teenagers for teenagers is that all the poems reflect aspects of adolescent life. It ensures that the anthology includes not only the obviously teenage poems that deal with unrequited love, betrayal, and loneliness, but also poems that address important wider issues such as war, racism and abortion, and more introspective ones that explore hopes and dreams. Similarly, the book's design does not conform to the stereotypical look of teen-lit (acidic colours and "wacky" pictures); instead, the simple layout and colour scheme make this a thoroughly sophisticated book.

Some of my favourites are Carol Ann Duffy's clever and unusual love poem 'Valentine', Sylvia Plath's darkly beautiful 'The Dead', and David Hughes' witty but challenging 'Swonzee Boy See?'. I also enjoyed Roger Hull's 'For the Child Who Became Christopher', 'As the Mist Leaves No Scar' by Leonard Cohen, and one of my all time favourite poems, 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' by Yeats, which I was glad to see included.

All in all, this is a lively and absorbing collection that covers a wide variety of themes and provides a poem for everyone.
Isabel Blake, 15, South Wiltshire Grammar School, Salisbury

'Some poems captured me completely, with others I felt no connection at all'

My first feeling on picking up Fifty Strong was curiosity. What type of poems would teenagers of my age choose to include in an anthology? How would it differ from other anthologies? And would these poems be relevant to me?

Fifty Strong is split into five sections, each chosen by a different group of teenagers. The effect of these sections is refreshing: their inclusion breaks up the anthology, encouraging the reader to appreciate each individual poem. Although the use of titled sections might have ended up restricting the poems that they held, in this case I found the opposite to be true. No two consecutive poems lingered on the same topic or overlapped one another; credit must go to the editors here for achieving such continuity without losing a sense of diversity.

While reading the anthology I came across poems that completely captured me as well as poems I felt no connection with at all. My favourite was Dylan Thomas's 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night', which I found instantly engaging. In contrast I couldn't quite understand why 'The Loch Ness Monster's Song', by Edwin Morgan, had been included: it made no impression on me whatsoever. Not appreciating every poem in the anthology, I found the notes sections invaluable in presenting me with some justification for the inclusion of the poems that I disliked, as well as giving a different perspective on the ones I enjoyed.

With preconceptions of an anthology brimming with teenage angst, and with memories of Seamus Heaney and Gillian Clarke's 'vivid' GCSE imagery still lucid, I was relieved to find that teenagers of my age could see through and indeed beyond the depths of compulsory poetry. I feel that the balance achieved in Fifty Strong unites the many themes explored, leaving 'life' as the underlying impression of this diverse collection.
Simon Bell, 17, Queen Elizabeth High School, Hexham