How to grow your own poem

Don’t run away from that title – stay and see what Kate Clanchy has to say. She absolutely knows her stuff. She’s spent decades teaching people how to get their poems into and out of their imaginations, up to standard and down onto paper. And just because she teaches in high school, which is quite likely the last time most adults including myself even attempted to write anything one might dare to call poetry, that doesn’t mean she hasn’t got something to say to you.

A lot of Clanchy’s writing advice is as good or better than many abstract academic analyses of approaches to articulation. She won the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Writing for her book about teaching, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. This book tells you some of what they taught her – and what she taught them.

Read work by people you admire, people you’ve never heard of whose experience is very different from your own, people who are acknowledged stars of their craft. And join the conversation about what you’ve read. It’ll help you get ready to start a conversation about what you’ve written.

Don’t hang around with the gerunds (the title of just one splendid practical section sprinkled throughout which is useful for many kinds of writing).

Give your work time to rise like bread, come back and see what’s happened to it while you were away.

How to Grow Your Own Poem shows you how to do this and more by sharing brilliant poems that world-famous, not as well-known as they should be, and written by Clanchy’s students, many of whom were learning to write in English. She shows how particular poems work and how you can make them work for you. Not by too much analysis of literary terminology, but by getting you to try the forms and patterns and strategies. Following each poem is another poem or two modelled on it, some pointers as to how it works, and then a “your turn” section. The pairings are startling and effective:

This is a book to get on paper and work with on paper. I know I still draw like a twelve-year-old, because that’s about when I stopped believing that I could draw anything that was “any good”. I’m sure I’m not the only one who believes the same about poems. But these holidays, I’m going to try more of Clanchy’s exercises in a notebook, with a pencil, in my own time. Even if they never see the light of day, it will help my other writing.

Clanchy stresses what has become something of a mantra for me: you need to fiercely protect the space and time to do your own writing. How and where you do that is up to you, but with this book, you can do it, and take some steps to opening up that space to share what you’ve written.