Poetry for beginners

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jan/27/poetry.schools

“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 to

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 “