Poetry in motion · Sun Feb 17, 21:01 by Eleri Straker
It’s that time of year again: revision time. Woohoo!
It’s time we revisited poetry so I told my lovely Yr 11s that they had a week in which to prepare dramatic presentations of any poem they wanted.
I divided them up into pairs or threes (depending on friendship groups), gave them lesson time to brain storm and to try out their ideas on me, then left them to it.
This week, armed with my book of criteria and a pencil, I sat in a corner and let the games begin.
It was astonishing.
Each group had devised something unique.
One pair turned Browning’s “Laboratory” into a Jerry Springer show, with the crazy would-be murderess explaining her motives to ‘Jerry’ and the audience. Another, using “Education for Leisure” as a stimulus, had a meeting between a psychiatrist and a seriously scary psychopath. Then there was the gently melancholic reminiscences of a traumatised Iraq war veteran as he tried to explain to himself and his counsellor what killing was like (Thomas Hardy’s “The man he killed”)
Each performance was as inspired as the first, but the most chilling was two students standing over a ‘body bag’, purportedly the body of their child as they read a suicide note from their offspring then defended their actions as the ‘ghost’ of their child challenged their version of the truth (We remember your childhood well). For once, I could find nothing to say, I just put down my pencil and listened. It was awesome in the true meaning of the word.
I know my Yr 11 is a good group, but today I found out just how good.
If they can maintain that wonderful original way of thinking, that imagination and that skill, they will make brilliant adults.
Out with the old, in with the new… Poetry in motion – part two
