own sake, I had to justify it and she’d show me things that would work better. Some of it is about space, some of it is with speaking it in mind, but what a treat to be able to choose the way something looks, that’s incredible, and a relatively new thing to me.’
As someone who writes so well from the teenage perspective, I was curious to find out if writing was something he thought he would do when he was a teenager; ‘Nobody told us that we were allowed. No one ever told us that and we didn’t know anyone who did it, so there was that thing that it wasn’t for us. If I’d have known, it would’ve been in my mind and I’d have got over my insecurities and been willing to share stuff much quicker I think, if I’d have thought I could. It’s so nonsensical now, but I think I thought writing was just things like The Railway Children.’
So what did lead him into the world of crafting such carefully curated narratives? ‘I am here today because of hip hop and because of a man called Paul Dennis. I’d been rhyming on the quiet for a little while and when I was about 18, he would send me tapes of beats. I should have been a waste of his time, but he allowed me to learn a craft by rhyming on his music, hoping that he’d like what I wrote, writing stories that way. That confidence and that wanting to impress him, that’s what made me want to share and left me feeling like I could.’
It’s just this feeling that he wants to pass on to the young people he works with on such a regular basis; ‘I’m kind of on a mission. I just like the idea of being an example, I think it should be on the shelf as a career, like being an accountant or rapper, or footballer. Not everybody wants to write, but everybody is allowed.’
Everything All At Once, Macmillan, 978-1509880034, £6.99 pbk Tape, HarperCollins, 978-0007511235, £7.99 pbk It’s About Love, HarperCollins, 978-0007511242, £7.99 pbk Nobody Real, HarperCollins, 978-0008168384, £7.99 pbk
Charlotte Hacking is Learning Programme Manager at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, a charity working to improve literacy in primary schools
Share your pupils’ poetry on NATIONAL POETRY DAY #MyNPDPoem
The #MyNPDPoem poetry writing challenge is now open, after being launched by Forward Arts Foundation in association with CLPE at the CLiPPA ceremony.
The challenge encourages schools everywhere to create poems, performances, displays and special books on a grand scale as part of the 25th anniversary of the
UK’s biggest celebration of poetry on National Poetry Day, Thursday October 3rd. Once children have written a poem or poems on the theme of truth, schools or
teachers can then share the best on National Poetry Day by tagging pictures on
Instagram or Twitter with #MyNPDPoem. Schools can hold their own poetry show on National Poetry Day by inviting everyone to perform their poems aloud, and sharing extracts as appropriate with the #MyNPDPoem hashtag.
Go online at
www.nationalpoetryday.co.uk to find free resources including a complete
#MyNPDPoem kit including customisable #MyNPDPoem certificates plus video tips from poets Michael Rosen, Rachel Rooney, Joseph Coelho, Victoria Adukwei Bully and Karl Nova.
In poetry, truth. MyNPDPoem BfK
ad.indd 1 08/07/2019 11:21
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