Me: this meters! Me: this meters!

This is exemplification –
I mean, of course, that

this matters!

A word sentence.

Once you is unacceptably poor writing
let’s be clear

this is a disturbingly meaningless meter.

No, that isn’t poetry.

This is, however,
with both meters, as in this perfect line,

and a metaphor.

Me: missing after ‘their’.

No, I am not,
but you have

when you wrote what you had written.

Me: let’s be clear – this suggests MPAN 2200019111453.

That there are two meters
companies are unable to support miscommunication –

but do not hesitate to contact back the meters.

Please be advised:

the physical transference implied
was the exemplification of miscommunication regarding

serial number 6719188.

[Image by artist and photographer Nick Dormand]

Read and/or download Viscid, a collection of Nick Dormand/Mike Ferguson collaborations 2016-2019.

So pleased to have my poem ‘biblical laughter’ here at International Times today – thank you. And a big thanks for the wonderful illustration by Rupert Loydell.

Kate Clanchy, writer and teacher [editor: England: Poems from a School – poetry from migrant children; writer: Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me – on teaching in general and teaching creative writing] is someone I know through her tweets, and these are predominantly examples of her students’ poetry, this prompted by her creative writing ideas/models – essential stimulus – and her guidance/encouragement as a teacher – fundamental.

She recently posted a wonderful poem by Helen, 14, Full Length Portrait of the Wind, and this was the stimulus for the poem [to read her poem, go to KC’s twitter account]:

If you take ten minutes at the beginning of the lesson to ask your students what sort of boots the wind is wearing this morning and what coat she has on, then no one’s GCSEs will be harmed and poems will probably occur. Helen was 14.

I am always impressed by, and as a writer/teacher myself empathetic to, the ideas and responses Clanchy posts, but what acted as a prompt to me was the assertion then ‘no one’s GCSEs will be harmed’, an obvious if satirical point one shouldn’t have to state, but there are plenty of educational philistines out there who wouldn’t have a clue.

I made a retweet about GCSEs in boots and KC responded with an urge for writing that personifies GCSEs – and I did, sort of. What I came up with was more emblem than personification, but I enjoyed the stimulus:

With thanks to ReVerse Butcher for posting my poem here at Burning House Press.

Do check out others in the this ongoing Vision issue.

As always, my sincere thanks to IT and Rupert for publishing this in the International Times – read here. My thanks [and acknowledgement] as well to Atlanta Wiggs for another wonderful image.

I am especially pleased when IT gives the occasional platform to my poems about education in general, but more often than not about teaching and the teaching of Writing. I can’t recall exactly what nonsense prompted this poem, but I will have come across, at random, some education ‘advice’ about writing intervention which was typically meaningless, invasive, and most likely quite brutal in its ‘corrective’ designs.

I don’t believe I ever used the term ‘writing intervention’ when working as an English teacher. I confess to occasionally having had to adapt the language of ‘leadership management’, for example in needing to prepare documentation for inspection. One such I can recall is ‘work scrutiny’, which isn’t as appalling as most, and the actual Writing stimulation and task we used collectively as a department was engaging and creative [as ‘proven’ by the work scrutiny of its outcomes!]. Maybe I should have called it ‘work discovery’…

I have written consistently my criticism of nonsensical approaches to the teaching of writing on this blog, not least about the previous and current SATs testing regimes and therefore consequent teaching to this. However, one of the dumbest but also brutal ‘celebrations’ of a teacher’s writing intervention idea was featured here.