Day 10 - Three Swans and Inside Your Head

Photo: Sally Douglas

The Three Swans

Inside my head

there is a black-eyed swan

with bones of steel.

Its feathered palms

beat words

from the air.

Inside the steel-boned glass-eyed swan

there is a paper swan:

razor-edged,

made by a prisoner in a tower

from his very last page.

Folded inside

the paper swan’s sharp angles

are all the words

of all the birds

in all the world –

and a perfect tiny drawing

of a swan.

.

 Sally Douglas

Today's poem is a bit of a cheat, as it's not new. The real poem for Day 10 will have to now be Day 11's.

This poem is part of my as yet embryonic collection of poems for children. I started writing poems for children when I was running a poetry club for Years 3,4, and 5. I was creating all these exercises and workshops for them, and of course, giving them a test run first. This poem came from a workshop I called 'Inside Your Head'.

We started by reading Miroslav Holub's poem 'A Boy's Head', and then went onto an extract from Luke Kennard's 'Wolf on the Couch' (The Migraine Hotel, Salt, 2009). The children were amazed by the surreality of Kennard's description of what was in his speaker's head: an owl, which 'appears to be made up of a network of tiny cities'.

‘And all the people in these tiny cities,’ says the wolf, ‘do they run for buses when the owl is wet? The men with their black umbrellas, the women with their Nancy Mitford novels held over their coconut-scented heads, the light in the city like an old grey ice cream?’

‘You’d need a microscope to see that,’ I mutter.

 

The children then followed these guidelines to create their own poems: 

Now, think:

What are the things inside your head? Animals? Objects? Impossible things? Dreams? Wishes? Fears? Worlds?

Brainstorm on the board the types of things people might have inside their heads.

Now have two minutes writing your own list of things that might be in your head.

Choose the ones you want to write about – perhaps two or three, or perhaps all of them – and start writing your poem.

Possible starters:

Inside my head…

I looked inside my head…

I spy behind my eyes…

‘What is in your head?’ asked the …..

 

And I have to say, some of the poems they produced were very good!

Any educators out there are welcome to use or adapt this exercise for their own use.

Children's Poetry

Fairytales, Lies and Rainbows

My poetry workshops for Year 4 and 5 children started again last week. Children seem to respond to poetry so easily, and in a world where they are assessed to death, it's rather nice to do something with them where they don't have to make sure they show a wide range of punctuation, or create complex sentences using a wide range of connectives, or indeed, make what is commonly described as 'sense'! Last year, inspired by Kenneth Koch's book 'Wishes, Lies and Dreams' I got a group of children to write a list of 'whoppers': things that could not possibly be true. Although some of the whoppers were rather prosaically grounded in reality (having lots of money, lots of ponies, and other things that were really wishes rather than lies) some of the whoppers were fantastic in all senses of the word. There were a lot of exclamation marks to make sure the reader didn't miss how enormous these whoppers were, but my favourite was this dead-pan tercet:

I can take out
My eyeballs and put them into
Cups and Mugs.

Different children respond to different types of prompts. Some love just being given free rein, while others produce their most powerful work from the confines of a strict framework.
One of my most successful workshops last year was quite structured: the children were given a framework for an interview with a fairy tale character, the notes from which they turned into a poem.

Here is the framework I gave them. It was photocopied onto an A3 sheet, so there was plenty of space for ideas.

Interview with a fairytale character

Choose a character from any fairy tale. It might be the hero or heroine, or an evil villain, or it could be a minor character who doesn't do much at all in the story, but sees it all happen.

Character name:    

Decide: when in the story are you interviewing them?
It might be at the beginning, sometime during the action, at the end, or years later. You need to decide this so you can imagine your character’s thoughts, feelings and appearance. You don’t have to tell us in the poem – we should be able to work it out!

Now, imagine you are the character you have chosen.
Here are some questions for you to answer.

Questions for your character

Describe your hands or feet.
What do they look like? How do they feel? Write your answer in the voice of the character.

My hands/feet are….

What temperature do you feel inside?  What geographical or weather feature is it like? (Choose one that’s not too obvious – eg don’t say ‘hot as the sun’

Inside my …                                     
I am…                                   

as …

What thing do you wish you were instead of yourself? (Perhaps something in the story, or perhaps something from another story? Something magical or something ordinary - you can choose.) And why?
I wish I were…

because/so/then…

How do you move? (Think of some exciting movement words/action verbs)
Where are you moving?

  

If you were an animal / something else, what would you be, and where would you go? (If your character is already an animal, choose a person for your character to imagine being.)

  

What can you see in front of you? What is it doing?
(Choose an object that is part of the story, but make it be doing something that it doesn’t necessarily do in the story, or it hasn’t done yet…)

Use all these answers to make a poem. You don’t have to put them in the same order as the questions, and of course you can add extra things in.

Choose one section, and repeat it somewhere in the poem, changing it slightly if you like.

Choose a title that gives the reader a clue to the character but doesn’t say exactly who it is!     

 

A great variety of poems was produced: we had the Wicked Witch of the West talking from her grave, the Frog Princess in a lather about rising water levels, Snow White contemplating revenge, and Red Riding Hood's Wolf contemplating tasty little girls. Some of them were so gruesome I felt I had to go and explain to parents that there honestly had been no obligation to write Stephen King type horror.  Eight and nine year-olds seem to just love being a bit subversive with early childhood stories, and if they can get some rotting bones in there somewhere, they're in creative heaven.


I had to test the framework, and this was the poem I came up with:

Step

My feet have no toes. Blood

drips on the floor.

My feet are small – but still not small enough.

Inside my head I’m hot as a hurricane.

In front of me the fire is turning to ash.

I wish I were a Barbie with her tiny tiny feet.

I’d have fitted my whole self

inside that sharp

glass shoe.

But now I hobble

from room to room – 

from window to fireplace, and back again,

a hundred times a day.

If I were a raven on the Castle tower,

I’d rap my beak against their window

as they sleep. Smash that perfect glass.

In front of me the fire has turned to ash.

The children weren't the only ones who got a bit dark...

On a more cheerful theme, we are, at the moment, working on poems about rainbows. We've imagined that a rainbow is something you can use, and we've brainstormed lots of wild ideas about possible uses. Rainbows seem to have magical qualities: we're getting a lot of variations on the themes of transformation and transportation, as well as the more mundane (if you can call them that) possiblilities of use as a slide or a bridge. The next step is to get the children to choose their favourite ideas, brainstorm some great 'rainbow words', and make a poem from them.

Hopefully there won't be a single dead body or vengeful heroine in sight! But you never can tell...