When you started working with Apples and Snakes about 20 years ago, you did a lot of work as one of our poet educators as well as making performance work for children and young people – how did this grounding in performing poetry for children help you develop your written work for these audiences? How do you use this within your written work?

There is nothing quite like standing in a school hall or classroom or a theatre space being stared at by a tonne of eager young faces wanting to be entertained. It’s terrifying and exhilarating. It’s also a wonderful space to hone your craft. In those early days I had plenty of poems and exercises that did not work, I failed a great number of times. Sometimes I would start a poetry writing session with a plan and then half-way through I would realise that I had exhausted all of my ideas – the kids had worked far more quickly than expected or perhaps weren’t as engaged as I hoped. I’d find myself inventing an activity on the spot. Some of those “on-the-fly” activities I still use today, they worked and were honed through repetition as I realised what kept the kids engaged and what didn’t.

Those early days as a poet educator for Apples and Snakes became a theatre of evolution. I had help of course. Through Apple and Snakes I had the pleasure of shadowing Francesca Beard at The British Library and seeing other greats like Malika Booker and Jacob Sam-La Rose work their magic learning and growing as I went along. Those lessons have informed and inspired a great deal of what I do now, teaching me what young audiences are hungry for, what displeases them, what thrills them and what gets them hooked. 

What made you want to write Poems Aloud?

Poetry comes to life in that shared space between stalls and stage, there is something primal in hearing a voice lifting up to the heavens to share carefully curated words.

Through Poems Aloud I hope to encourage more young people to lift up their voices and to feel first-hand the benefits that lie therein: the increases in confidence, the welding of bravery and the solidifying of joy. 

Poems Aloud is all about fun and getting stuck in. What’s the funniest moment you’ve had working with poetry and children?

I think it’s rare to have a day in a school where there isn’t a moment of joyous laughter- comes with the territory. I often run an exercise where I get the whole class to walk around the room reading their poems aloud all at the same time, as you can imagine the classroom becomes a cacophony of sound. I then shout “FREEZE” and then challenge them to continue reading but this time using a happy voice, they continue reading and now the sound is loud but very happy until I shout “FREEZE” again and suggest: an angry voice/a chilled voice/a robot voice/a witch’s voice!/ a silly voice. Each iteration often leads to students rolling on the floor laughing at their own voices and the strange sounds issuing from their classmates’ lips. 

Your book is beautifully illustrated by Daniel Gray-Barnett, how do the illustrations compliment your work?

Daniel’s illustrations really do leap off the page. They are poems in themselves and I think his use of colour is amazing. The vibrancy of his images makes you want to lift the poems up and shout them out. But he also is able to show great tenderness and sensitivity through his work.

I’m thinking here of his spread for the poem This Bear, a poem about a bear being released into the wild after a lifetime of captivity. Daniel’s spread shows the bear from behind gazing up into a beautiful pink sky and it’s like you can hear the bear’s sigh of relief to be free. 

How did you take the initial ideas of Poems Aloud into print and how long did this take? Did you start off with a single poem and were asked to write more by the publisher?

The book took the best part of a year to put together. I began by thinking about the different performance techniques I wanted to share and then writing poems that would best highlight those techniques. For instance, I knew I wanted to write a poem that would be read quietly and get progressively louder. With that concept in mind, I started to think about subjects that would suit the performance and that’s how I came up with the notion of a poem about a radio being turned up when a favourite song plays. 

What are your top 3 tips to encourage children to enjoy reading and writing poetry?

Value their voice and their experience. Let them know that the things they are interested in, whatever that may be, is ripe material for a poem be it computer games, unicorns or Pokémon! And that their opinions and their take on things can also make great poems. Maybe they want to write a poem about their favourite football team, or why they think they should be able to eat cake for dinner or why adults should do more about climate change! 

Give them a notebook, a beautiful notebook and a fun pen. I love stationary and there is pleasure in using different coloured pens and pencils, I have used novelty pens that look like skeletons that box! Pens that vibrate, pens that are glittery, pens that light up and flash.

The act of putting pen to paper should be a fun experience and very little is more fun than writing in a beautiful book with a brilliant pen. 

Allow opportunities for new experiences, invite them to make notes whilst visiting a gallery or a museum or a theme park or the local park or simply a walk around their local streets. Take them on a local adventure exploring local streets you’ve never been down before. It’s amazing how different your local environment can look from a new perspective and this of course can fire up the imagination. What lurks behind the library? Where does that alley lead? Where might that footpath take you?

For any aspiring writers of children’s poetry what’s the one thing you wish you knew when you started writing for kids?

That there is a need for more published children’s poetry. If I had realised that I would have gone knocking on the door of publishers much earlier. That said, when I started out there was a belief that poetry doesn’t sell, which of course is nonsense. Like anything, books that are well marketed and promoted and believed in and, of course, are good, will always sell and a lot of that can be done on the enthusiasm and passion of the poet. Are you willing to read your poems at the local library or bookshop? Do you have ideas for writing activities based around your poems? Have you shared your poems at any poetry events? All of these things are something to think about.

Obviously apart from you – who are your top three poets writing and performing for kids?

Oh gosh that’s too hard so I’m going to say six! 

I love hearing John Agard perform he has such a commanding prescence. 

John Hegley always surprises with his words of fancy and delight. 

Valerie Bloom always makes me stop and think with words that paint pictures. 

Matt Goodfellow’s poems and performance style has beautiful heart and honesty. 

Julia Donaldson is a complete delight to watch her stories are simultaneously songs and poems.

Ruth Awola’s poetry is beautiful and powerful and sweet and sincere. 

What’s next for Joseph Coelho?

A great deal of writing, I have some exciting projects coming up which I can’t wait to share across the age ranges with a new Luna book with Illustrator Fiona Lumbers, another Fairy Tales Gone Bad story with illustrator Freya Hartas and of course more poetry including another collection with illustrator Daniel Gray-Barnett called Smile Out Loud, filled with happy poems. 

Joseph Coelho is an award-winning children’s author, performance poet and playwright based in London. His debut poetry collection, Werewolf Club Rules, was the 2015 winner of the CLPE CLiPPA Poetry Award. His second book, Overheard in a Tower Block, was shortlisted for the 2018 CLPE CLiPPA Poetry Award and is longlisted for the 2019 UKLA Book Awards. Joseph features in the BBC Teach ‘Understanding Poetry’ online series.

His work has poetry and performance at its heart, drawing on over 16 years’ experience running dynamic creative literacy sessions in schools. He aims to inspire young people through stories and characters they can recognise.

His most recent work, Poems Aloud, is now available from your usual book stores and retailers.

Follow Joseph: Website | Twitter | Instagram

Image credit: The Bear – taken from Poems Aloud, illustrated by Daniel Gray-Barnett

“I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean – in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.” – Audre Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury

It was the winter of 2020 when the deadline for my debut collection was chasing me. I’d waited ten years for this moment, to write this book. Yet there I was, in post-blast Beirut, working every day on the ground with people left behind in crisis. Working with doctors, pharmacists, landlords, and food suppliers, at all hours of day and night trying to suspend lives a little longer. Beneath this, the pandemic had taken the best of many of us; my own lungs scarred. I opened my laptop to tell my editor that I had fallen out of love with poetry, that it was superfluous. She wouldn’t accept my pulling out of the contract.

During the past two years, every poet has had a different experience of their time to write. For nobody has this been easy, but for many it was a time to crystalise our why and what for. There were people for whom the pandemic was a golden opportunity to stay at home with the dog, lonely as the neighbour, but enjoying the quiet roads and practising sestinas. For other’s the months passing were a marching band of grief, fishnets of claustrophobia in one-bed flats, or family members imprisoned in care homes; the institutionalisation of those who couldn’t be trusted alone in such desolate times.

I was living predominantly in Lebanon. If my heritage has one thing to teach me it is that poetry is a political act. An everyday happening at the rakweh. A tool for protest. A resource.

It is Ahmed Fouad Negm writing colloquial poems to fill the mouths of dissidents who were hungry to stack chants upon their tongues in Egypt.

It brings to mind Solmaz Sharif:
A lover, once: You can’t say every action is political. Then the word political loses all meaning.
He added: What is political about this moment?
I was washing his dishes. I had left the water running.

I was speaking to Farah Z. Aridi, a poet living in the mountains of Lebanon, during the winter I was wrestling with writing the book. She said, “I think it is time for criticism, reflection, and reassessment of our revolutionary work. And poetry seems a luxury. I do feel that poetry can definitely give me hope I don’t need, hope in a dreamy way and not a productive manner.”

Poetry says I believe in a tomorrow where poetry can be read. Around me, we were dealing with so much collapse we could not believe in tomorrow.

Nikki Giovanni famously wrote:
maybe i shouldn’t write / at all  / but clean my gun  / and check my kerosene supply 
perhaps these are not poetic / times / at all 

Any free time I got wasn’t spent sat at my desk writing poems, I was riding my motorbike through the hailstones falling across Beirut trying to arrange shelter or housing for another single mother victim of human trafficking. As I pulled my helmet off and saw another text chasing me for my manuscript, I spoke back to my editor and said, I am establishing a new relationship with poetry before I can do this. If I wanted poems as tools and resources of daily survival, I had to close the gap between imagination and action.

Farah messaged me, “I refuse to write what I can’t apply.”

When I went to visit the family of a Syrian refugeed baby I’d been helping organise medical care for, I observed their eyes lighting up as I admitted to them, “انا شاعر” – I’m a poet. It was inappropriate of me not to have a poem to share right then and there, a practical poem for the small room we sat in. So, we bent our heads in silence, sharing the maqlub between us, a giant mound of rice. In the silence I decided I wanted to write rice. How can poems be as useful as grains of rice in crisis?

Naomi Shihab Nye says she writes for “our own ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.” I call these Practical Poems. I want to write practical poems. Rice poems. I want coffee poems. Protest poems. Poems I can recite to my friends as we road trip through the mountains searching for reprieve or when spilling our secrets over one another by night.

Practical words for the unoffending moments of the day.

Small gifts to lower gently into the mundane.

If a poet only writes for poets, who will see the gods pouring out the saltshaker?

Poet Shareefa Energy, who recently partnered with Level Up, a feminist grassroots organisation campaigning to end prison sentencing for pregnant women, spoke to me about all of this. She believes one job of the poet is to “bring truth to light; to be the media when media is scarce in times of upheaval. Practical poetry, then, is translating it all back in to the language of the people.”

To shed light one must have light. Light from beauty. We have to know beauty in order to want the tomorrow’s where poetry will be read. We are allowed, of course, to write about “the starlings,” as Shareefa does. This essay isn’t to insist we must write Practical Poetry, but to remind us that there is a tremendous value if we can. Revolutionary times call for a necessary type of poem.

Great writer of Practical Poems, Salena Godden, said once: “stories are like seeds”. After everything I had seen maybe I didn’t want to plant seeds in the abstract, in the intellectual, in the niche or the elite. I wanted to plant seeds in the ordinary. I wanted the mundane to grow back.

Even now I am writing this when so many of my friends cannot write, their trauma still too raw, I recognise my luxury of sitting and penning these words to you. Practical poems will be an ongoing practise, one I haven’t mastered, but long may the poem live beyond the books, and into the streets, or even better: beside the rice.

“Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change.” – Audre Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury

lisa luxx is an activist and poet of British and Syrian heritage. Her poems are published in The Telegraph, The London Magazine and by publishers including Hatchette and Saqi Books. Her work is broadcast on Channel 4, BBC Radio 4 and TEDx. In 2021 she toured UK theatres with the show for her 60-minute poem Eating the Copper Apple, produced by a team of all Arab women artists. Her debut book Fetch Your Mother’s Heart is out now through Out-Spoken Press.

luxx is also one of six poets for this year’s Jerwood and Apples and Snakes Poetry in Performance programme – blending together spoken word and poetry with other artforms.

luxx has now released her debut collection Fetch Your Mother’s Heart with Outspoken Press.

Follow lisa on Instagram and Twitter.

Young people are so often taught to think in binary terms: you’re either one thing or the other

I started that paragraph talking about language. A great love of mine. But I ended up talking about numbers. Another great love of mine. For some, this would be a contradiction. How can you love language and numbers? How can you be a poet and a mathematician? Young people are so often taught to think in binary terms: you’re either one thing or the other. You’re good at Mathematics or you’re good at English. Girls are better at this. Boys are better at that.

I’m grateful to say that I managed to swerve the binary brainwash. I was introduced to a range of subjects and activities before I even got to school. I loved writing poetry. I loved Maths. I loved football. I loved ballet. I loved baking. I loved kick-boxing. I loved trying everything. And there were no binaries to be seen. Furthermore, when I got to high school age I chose to go to a girls’ school so once again the idea of binaries went out the window. I was exposed to all types of people in that environment. It just so happened that we all identified as female.

The binaries we often experience when it comes to subjects such as Maths and English are so often associated with another one – the gender binary. Copious studies have told us that girls are not pursuing careers in the fields of science and mathematics. Schemes like STEM have been set up to tackle this problem. In principle I am happy that STEM exists. However, in both intention and application it adheres to the same binary that it attempts to solve.

1. Girls are bad at mathematics
2. Boys are good at mathematics
3. Girls needs schemes to help them get better careers
4. Boys do not need schemes to help them get better careers
5. STEM subjects are more important than other subjects
6. We need more girls in those topics to boost the economy (as opposed to considering how those fields will actually benefit from having more diverse contributions)

In my view, we need to change the approach if we want to see real change.

the gender gap for attainment is non-existent in terms of actual abilities being gendered

A recent article by Katherine Wu at NOVA¹ stated that results of research into subject attainment and the gender gap are reported in a way that’s misleading. In actual fact, the results from over 60 countries around the world show that the difference between male and female mathematics attainment is pretty insignificant. Furthermore, since girls are ‘seen’ to excel in more verbal and language-based subjects at an earlier age, they are led to believe that, in comparison or simply by assumption, they are bad at mathematics. The binary brainwash.

Wu’s article was a pleasure to read because it said all the stuff that I have found to be true from my experience of training as a mathematics teacher (shout out to my boss, Suzie, for sending it to me). It essentially concludes that the gender gap for attainment is non-existent in terms of actual abilities being gendered. Instead, the gap we see is a product of poor socialization, poor confidence and misinterpreted statistics!

I want to deliver fun creative maths lessons that feel like poetry workshops

I’ll always remember when I was in a primary school in Levenshulme as part of my teacher training. During a lesson I was astounded by the way that socialization and gendered expectation had, at such a young age, already made a mark on the students’ learning. As girls we are taught to be vulnerable and express our feelings. Many boys are taught to be confident and not show signs of weakness. I went around the classroom helping the students with their fractions. All of the girls who were struggling were happy to say, “Miss I’m struggling.” “I don’t understand it.” “I’m not sure if I’ve got the right answer.” Immediately I was able to help. They got the answer and moved onto the next activity. All of the boys who were struggling didn’t tell me. I could see that they didn’t have a clue. However, when I asked them if they needed help the response was, “Nah Miss I’m good at this.” “I know what I’m doing.” “I’ve got the answer.” Even after I had explained that they hadn’t. It broke my heart that these 7-year-old boys already felt that they needed to perform this false sense of security, and that it was having a detrimental effect on their learning. They didn’t know the answer. They couldn’t move on.

as all boys did so I tried to do
Inspired by Roger Robinson’s As All Boys Did

headers
grey Filas
galt
on slugs
Ren and Stimpy
protests in McDonalds
when they gave me
Barbie
instead of a car
scars upon scars
on corduroy knees
running face first to the wind
to win the playground race
Chinese burns and head locks

until I was asked to  – show ’em my privates
pretence deciphered
not one of them
don’t let them see my
church dresses
and butterfly wings

singing football chants
louder than the next lad
Tekken and Need for Speed
a fist to the screen then
a stern look from my mother

…No more Playstation till you learn
to calm your temper

I was an open-mouthed breather

flipping collectable coins
playing to the binary of biology, this species
bird faeces on the shoulder is a good sign
I’ve been stabbing trees
cutting the doll’s hair off
kickboxing and blue socks
wrestling and mud and mud and throwing rocks
in the park instead of bread

straddling the shed
coming to the edge like Evel Knievel
ready to break bones
hoping I will crack myself open
show them the rotting spice
everything nice and pink
like blood curdled with piss
this is what I am made of

With all this in mind, for the past two years I have been developing an idea for a project called DeCipher, sharing how I merge mathematics with poetry. So far I’ve had the pleasure of working with school groups and young people with the help of Manchester Science Festival and Africa Writes. In the full version of the project I want to merge my artistic practices with Realistic Mathematics Education theory. Basically I want to deliver fun creative maths lessons that feel like poetry workshops or dance classes or baking parties. I want to teach people from a range of ages, backgrounds, genders. Hopefully I can do something to guide us back towards the original meaning of binary – ‘two together’. Things do not have to be one or the other, or should that be one or zero?

Keisha Thompson is a Manchester-based writer, performance artist and producer. Find out more about her work at keishathompson.com or follow her on Twitter.

1. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/gender-gap-math-comparative-advantage/

How were we to know/ that when we were cleansing/ we were erasing our whole existence – CUNTO, Joelle Taylor

My whole life has been a protest, and my body a political placard. My body has also been a battleground and a bar room, a tourist spot and a cemetery, a haunted house and a roadside memorial. What it has rarely been is mine.

I hitched to Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp from Lancashire several times in my teens, having read about the radical nature of a women-only protest. Founded by nuns who had walked from Wales to Berkshire to confront the cruise missile base, the camp became a homing signal for all of us badly written girls.

A furious mix of naive and brave, I turned up to Yellow Camp (main gate) aged 17 with nothing but a borrowed rucksack of rages, a notebook crowded with small black handwriting, and a pen. The pen is important. Think of it as the same one I write with now.

Greenham was far more than a peace protest for many of the dispossessed under-class women who made our way there. It was alive with possibility, mutable, irreverent, long-talking, kind, bad-mouthed and above all woman-focused. We were a new way of doing things, we were new things. I spent most of my time crouched in front of the fire, taking copious tiny handwritten notes and writing letters, or listening to elders talk about the first wave of feminism and CND. I was alive.

I spent most of my time crouched in front of the fire, taking copious tiny handwritten notes and writing letters

I can’t remember the names of the women who parented me at Greenham, but I do remember the cheap tent they erected for me, the blanket they found. I remember the quiet fire, and the crackle of conversation. I remember the plans for a changed world that showed us the shapes of our own mouths. I remember the long and freezing nights curled around ideas. I remember how we unpicked sections of the 9-mile wire perimeter fence as though it was a badly knitted jumper that needed reimagining.

My first direct political action involved cutting an opening in the perimeter fence over a number of days, taking care to tack-stitch it together again so the soldiers wouldn’t notice the base had been breached. Using wire cutters to slit a fence takes time, and so we divided the work between several of us, cutting it by increments. If we had tried to cut the whole opening in one go we would have been easily caught. On the appointed night of the action, seven of us quietly stole ourselves away from Yellow Gate into the surrounding woodland. We slept in the open and waited. At 4am we returned to the tacked opening, unpicked it and entered the base. We used blankets to help each other pass under the inner razor wire fence, until all seven of us were inside the facility, next to the runway. It was that easy to break into a high security nuclear missile base. This was one of our main points; if a group of 7 untrained women ranging from 17 to mid 70’s could break in, imagine what a militarily trained organisation could do. We made our way directly to the missile bunkers, carefully planted the saplings we’d brought with us and waited. I probably took the opportunity to hand roll and smoke a cigarette (which I also did while in the dock at my trial – irreverence for authority was a particular Greenham tactic, arguably natural to a group of little sisters and grandmothers). After far too long a time the soldiers came and aimed their rifles at us. We giggled. We could: we were all white.

Writing allowed me to put a thin piece of paper between myself and a world that did not want me there

We were arrested and taken to separate huts for interrogation, but all refused to speak. This is much more difficult than it sounds. Eventually I was charged under the 1984 Prevention of Terrorism Bill and was tried and sentenced in court.

Over the years, there were more actions and more arrests and detainments, but through it all was the pen. It seemed to me that I would always be safe if I had it with me, if I immediately wrote down what was happening and how. Writing allowed me to put a thin piece of paper between myself and a world that did not want me there.

From that point on poetry and political action have always walked beside each other for me. They are twins I sometimes have difficulty telling apart, in the same way that my politics and my body are linked.

The butch woman wears bare face and short hair not to accentuate a masculinity but to force a rethinking of what a woman is. Is she just clothes and make up? Really? In the 80’s it was a frightening thing to do, to stand there like that out in the open. And it helped us recognise each other, to form a strong and instinctive community. After Greenham we tribed together in dyke bars and art squats, still political by the simple act of being. We were kings of nothing much. To live outside the system is easy with a community such as this: no job, no fixed abode, no bank account. In the background were other activist groups;  Act Up was ferocious in its defense of gay men and tackling prejudice around the AIDS epidemic, and the Lesbian Avengers staged protests, including abseiling into the House of Commons, and breaking into the live Nine O’Clock News. Culturally we had spaces where we could hang out, from bars to theatres and even Dyke TV on Channel Four.

Poetry and political action have always walked beside each other for me

Now that all of this lesbian-focused space has receded like the tide before a tsunami it is time for us to remember our journeys, our bodies, our friendships and how radical an act it was and still is for us to simply breathe.  

My spoken word poem CUNTO is a way of breathing. It highlights the journey we masculine women, we butches, we gold star lesbians have taken. It speaks of the female body as a political act and focuses on one simple intent: the taking back of a body. It looks at homophobia and misogyny and talks about the community we forged to overcome the grief of our own lives. But it is also a celebration of the protests led by women from the 80’s through to mid-2000’s, and how much I owe them as a woman and as a writer.

Today writing has become my political act. The fact that I choose to write is political in itself. There is something about the contradiction between the potential longevity of words and the brief and unrepeatable act of performance that attracts me, that is radical at its core, and which proves to me that I am still alive.

See Joelle perform CUNTO as part of Rallying Cry | 28 & 29 May, 7.30pm | Albany, Deptford | info & booking

Banner photo: Suzi Corker