There is further information in the current CUP English subject catalogue about my book, Writing Workshops, written with fellow author Martin Phillips, which is being enthusiastically received by those who have used it in their classroom teaching.

An important reminder to attach to a couple of images I want to share here is the fact that our book is not attached to any specific Awarding Body syllabi – it is applicable across all of the the examination board syllabuses offering GCSE English Language:

I want to also promote the accompanying digital content for our book, not least my interview with the engaging Willy Vlautin which links to the workshop I have written about composing dialogue and uses an extract from his novel Lean on Pete as stimulus. I was delighted to read in Sunday’s Observer that this superb story and book is going to be made into a film:

My final promotion is for the free Teacher’s Resource that is available to use with Writing Workshops. I wrote this to provide as much supporting, practical advice and ideas as I could, as well as convey a continuing sense of the ethos both Martin and I used with genuine conviction to underpin the classroom ideas,

Originally posted March, 2014:

This poem about my Aunt Alma, born in Elk Horn, Iowa, and who lived most of her life in Omaha, is also about Nebraska: there is the obvious namecheck, but the references to the heat and humidity are so much about that midwestern State, and then references to decals, flashlights, neon and the Interstate place it firmly in America too.

It is a poem that I wrote some time ago, one of the earliest that I had crafted so carefully and perhaps represents a change in my style from youthful randomness. It was written here in England – like so many I was reading Gunn and Hughes at the time [I’m not making comparisons, just obvious influences!] – and reflects a little the two voices I have in my writing. I know it signals its ruse too much and too often, and it is metaphor/simile heavy in the way aping better writers will promote. But it is of its time and whenever I read, I recall with affection the influential person it describes.

Aunt a la Recherche

The filter wears a crimson kiss;
mug-brims too sport
lipstick crescents with coffee stains.
She is tattooing things with codes,
a few decals announcing her like billboards.

From sentences sanded through larynx bobs
her phrases growl out to press into my ears –
nostalgia as condensed as humidity recalling
summer heat, sweat,
days spent listening to her deep speech.

The words are flashlights, beacons from inland.
Nebraska plains span in her open eyes,
stretch behind into memories.
Perfume and smoke are
morse-smells tapping messages –

[car fumes along the Interstate creep back from nowhere].
Downtown neons flash across her smile
and she coughs: thunder roars from lightning;
hail strips leaves, roof shingles, dreams.
Rain falls all day here.

Cigarette butts, used tissue, empty glass – through these
she leaves a refuse. Clearing up,
I pocket the ash burnt off a long story.
The room is a limbo just then,
a tableau hung in the now silent air.

NB if you came to this via Twitter I apologise, sort of, for the naughtiness of that twitter title, but few seem to visit my Nebraska posts, and I was nudging….

Originally posted February, 2014:

Having decided to take on the theme of Nebraska and run with this, initially because of the often comic references to it, especially in film and song, as a rather remote nothingness, I have increasingly reflected on the State, and especially Omaha, as the place of my birth and therefore significant in defining that part of me which remains inherently and often surprisingly American, not surprising because of any resistance – far from it – but because I have lived most of my life here in England.

In then researching other reflections on the State and its largest city, as well as different areas where my family and I have lived, I came across the fine American poet Ted Kooser  (born in Iowa) and someone who writes about Nebraska with great affection but also visual and emotional clarity. I should also stress what a fine poet he is in general, tagged the ‘Poet Laureate of the United States’, and whose collection Flying at Night I am currently reading and from which I will at some stage post a non-Nebraskan poem. But for now, here is one aptly titled

So This Is Nebraska

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of the redwing blackbirds.

On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting at every post.

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.

You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in weeds,

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like

waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

Buzzing

It isn’t new but still a good idea, an anthology with an eclectic mix of writers responding to a single stimulus, here the image The Poet by Joel-Peter Witkin, 2005,

The impetus for this is explained in a note from Rupert Loydell,

I am pleased to have a poem in this collection and it is as entertaining for a fellow writer as it will be for an objective reader to encounter the range of responses to that singular source. Apart from the mention of spoon/s nine times [we’ll call it ten now, rounding it up] the ekphrastic poems see and describe with considerable differences.

Naturally, poets writing about The Poet reflect on the nature of this appellation. Paul Sutton leads off the collection with The Failed Poet, the persona whose wife, like departed readers, ruminates

‘…….God, is he still working?
No one reads his stuff, or cares.’

But the poet has his integrity because he can still assert his intentions as a writer, still trying,

‘…..If you look
hard unto any object, the atoms
sometimes wave.’

In Carrie Etter’s She, the literal ‘They are fierce spoons they are nailed into her head’ is absorbed by the other reality ‘Inchoate is she, is the long walk home’, gender not an issue but the one certain variable.

For Peter Finch in Poetry is Over, dissolution within the artistic urge to continue trying is referenced through the analogy of musicians who revamp their oeuvre, ‘musicians from the seventies’ like Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison ‘adding orchestras taking away the edges smoothing on mature value’ but ‘it never makes enough in the welter of expanded vision’.

Martin Stannard frames his response in framed deconstructions of the apparent shallowness and/or loss of identity, a recognition made empty in the artifice of its self-referencing, ‘”It’s not like you’re, like, in the real world, is it?”’

Physical features feature throughout all the poems, either as the visual metaphors in the stimulus image or what they represent, as in H.L. Hix’s title poem Nerve Damage where they are comically drawn, as of ears ‘Bigger by a barefoot crick crossin. People notice. That one ear’s biggerin Maude’s back yard’ before we are reminded that how we look is irrelevant in the bigger picture, ‘There’s a poetry to this footage of refugees receiving instruction in the language of border patrol.’

Ian Seed opens the door to uncertainty in another one of his wonderful vignettes, here about students, the visiting poet from India, a dead father, and the back door that needs its lock repaired.

For Alan Halsey the conclusion is ‘I didn’t believe a word of it’ when another narrative interprets our poet’s life, and David H.W. Grubb would have us believe his name was Spike,

‘The last time I spoke to Spike
he had his head down a long poem’

but that is another unique unravelling, a bit like Spike when composing

‘digging up unique words
as luminescent as BONGO.’

It is also The Luminous Poet for A.C. Evans where

‘…..crazy showgirls just blew my mind
Took me apart in a smash and grab, hit and run
I tell you, officer, there’s something weird in that junkyard’

or as the poet tells us himself in Rupert M. Loydell’s Rictus,

‘All my poems now are
dense scribbles between
morning and shadow.’

This damage done to the notion we can fix and agree on what we all receive and then describe, the nervous energy of the poets’ panoply is a lively buzz.

Can be purchased here:

UK: £5.00 per copy, cheques payable to ‘R.M. Loydell’
USA: $10 bill per copy, to include postage
Or I can sort out Paypal for anyone.

Rupert Loydell

4B Tremayne Close, Devoran, Cornwall TR3 6QE, England

As reported in today’s Telegraph [sometimes one has to…] the news about Nicky Morgan’s misspelling of sincerely as sincerily has not been justified/dismissed/countered/lied about/deflected/massaged by DfE drafters whose job it is to whitewash any criticism of government error as they have come up against the proverbial brick wall in the challenge and task of writing a defense for this whopper of a mistake:

A Department for Education spokesman said: “That’s not something we’re going to comment on.”

Subversion

It is unlikely teachers would have the time – and the relief of not having to set the KS1 Spelling Tests, even if for one year only, is a feeling to understandably pause and savour – but a further cathartic pleasure as well as creative tangent would be to take the existing tests and subvert them for actual teaching and learning.

It would be difficult, I admit, at KS1, but we are encouraged to be challenging! Whatever, and for wherever and whenever, here is an idea for stimulating groups of students to explore and discuss and write their own versions of answers to the original spelling tests: not as spelling, but in thinking about the potential of meanings prompted by single word choices [and no, not the nonsense of ‘Wow’ words, but real words].

The more words students encounter and use, there will be the experience of spelling these too, so two birds with one throw of the existential word-dice.

The following posts include the original answers to the now withdrawn spelling test, and the original ‘answer’ pages with substituted words to use, or use as ideas:

Originally posted February, 2014:

I have posted this poem before as part of a triplet, but it does, I think, stand on its own. It is a true account of an experience when I was a young boy, maybe around 8, when my father and his friend marched out ahead of me on a disused railway bridge over the Missouri River [*] raging some considerable distance below. We were all going fishing, me following behind. The gaps between the wooden ties they confidently strode across and along seemed huge to me then, and the fall to the river below was palpable both in its apparent inevitability and the fear it caused me, even now as I recall it. We also climbed down onto one of the concrete pillars that supported the railway line as our fishing platform. I don’t know how I did this either. What I do remember so clearly is almost immediately dropping my bamboo fishing pole into the river, so scared and shaking that I couldn’t hold onto it, and equally vividly, but I’m bound to doubt for some reason, there was a petrified fish [no pathetic pun intended] laying on the top of this pillar.

Fishing

Did someone further down the Missouri
snare my bamboo fishing pole,
maybe by accident and, later,
when the river slowed and lowered,
sit down calmly at its side and dangle
a line into the cold steady flow,
hooked a fish I could only dream about
when scared by rapids I’d dropped it
from a railway bridge up near Niobrara?
It is always possible that someone
will find triumph in another’s fears
and it could be this optimism that drives us on,
even if we only discover it years later
when hankering after an idea of hope.

[*] Researching this evening it might have been the Niobrara River, a tributary of the Missouri. I found the picture below too just now, but I have no idea at all if this is the actual bridge. On the one hand it doesn’t in any way reflect what I recall as a massive fall to the river below, but on the other there is a sense of the huge expanse and remoteness of the place. I’m sure it is a mistake to try and literally capture and explain. Of contemporary interest as we deal with the flooding here in England, Niobrara as a village, founded in 1856, had been flooded itself so often it was eventually and literally moved to higher ground in 1977. That’s flood avoidance on a grand scale.

NB This poem also appears in my collection The Precarious Real, details here.

All this creative angst and then the forced-to-be-righteous Nick Glib goes and cancels the KS1 SPaG tests for one year.

As this topsy-turvy day draws to a good close, we can only hope another cock-up has the knock-on effect of getting the KS2 tests cancelled too.

Here’s to the paradox of thanking ineptitude for triumphing over policy-making.

He is about four years old
and like most kids his age,
he is walking along the wall
above the footpath,
because it is there,
now coming to its end
where his mother is coaxing
him down with
‘Good boy, good boy’
and it is a parent’s
positive encouragement
with her love and care,

yet then she says,
‘Good parenting’
which surprises me,
this self-referencing as a
kind of paternal narcissism,
and I wonder if she has been
reading a book
on how to raise a child,
needing advice and help when
there isn’t any other in her life?

But no, we do not need
guidance on how to stop the
boy from falling off the wall
or telling him he is doing well
because this is instinct and
common sense,
whereas that one strange line
seems like some form of
absurd mantra from a
self-help scheme
in the extreme.

There are many things to learn
but we do it from experience,
and there are many things to do
to protect a child or help
them along in life
and a wall,
like that encouragement,
and there are many things you
just know not to let them do
like running across a road
or sticking a finger in a socket
or even taking tests when they
are still young and not
walking on the pavement provided,
or even older and getting lost
or running out of breath
and falling over into walls;

tests for example
on grammar and spelling and
punctuation which are built on
barriers dangerously high above
the ground, and not built on
solid foundations,
so you must not
let your child take these tests
that do not encourage them
or offer protection.

But then, as I go through this
to and fro of thinking,
and over-thinking,
and walking along the wall too
and recalling something I read,
a dire warning by someone
who claims they know best,
and tell me what I have to do,
perhaps there is a need
because ‘Good parenting’ isn’t a
complete sentence,
is it?

Psssssst – the answers are in italics

Education Secretary Nicky Morgan would seem to make mistakes faster than her predecessor Michael Gove but they are neck in neck as disasters. Nicky, who would seem to have a sunny disposition compared with Gove’s pompous poo face, is really the same in arrogant incompetence.

On the face of it, we can group education decisions by the pair of these into a singular – if you excuse the paradox – ‘two fingers gesture’ to students, teachers and parents. It all paints a familiar despairing picture of nastiness and ineptitude.

And Morgan is not a fluffy kitten when it comes to mistakes. She would no doubt try to distance herself from the latest Education error, and she can only be ironically thanked for presiding over the DfE leaking of KS1 Spelling Test papers. Ironic because it is like making a Saturday a holiday off from work: the tests have already in many cases been done as the sample they were intended to be, or they are expected to be done with no hope whatsoever of achieving their intended purpose. It is like making sweets laced with laxatives, or baking a birthday cake with exploding candles, to give to the nation’s children.

Morgan knew these tests were useless anyway, or she should have done. They exist like all the others simply as a model of measuring over actual teaching and learning: a whale full of blubber as a deceit for substance. They exist to cause a world full of pain for students, teachers and parents who are force-fed their fatuous fat.

The DfE drafters hurried out a dismissive deflection that the leaked tests were not really important anyway, like pulling each petal from a flower to destroy the evidence. It is a rainbow of deception across the blackest sky.

And then we all woke up in a peaceful bed surrounded by our teddies and this fantastical tale was just a dream……