The ministry of play

speaks about the ‘helter skelter rides of rhyme and rhythm’ to be found in poetry for all ages

The illustration for the poem 'Stone Says' | Photo: Jonathan Gross

Think of this as a note of introduction, tucked in the flyleaf of a book. The book is Off Road To Everywhere, a collection of poetry for children, which ideally I would leave lying round your Meeting house, for the young people in your Children’s Meeting and for anyone to come upon by chance. It is meant to be shared.

‘Poetry on Quaker themes’ it’s not… unless life and feelings, good attention to the world around us and within us, and the right valuing of language in all its rich layers, its slippery twists and turns, are ‘Quaker themes.’ (Of course they are.) Plain speaking? Early Friends might have raised an eyebrow at poems, which delight in helter-skelter rides of rhyme and rhythm, or leave an image dangling by its fingernails over a silence, no clear moral at the end. But maybe noticing that edge of silence is the key.

Early Friends were right to reject ‘high’ language dressed up to impress, flaunting its learning as a way of blinding people to the quiet truths of their experience. Modern poets agree. Creative writing workshops work to pare drafts back to the quick of what the writer really means. Remember Basil Bunting, great modernist poet whose childhood left a vein of Quaker instincts in him: ‘Brief words are hard to find… Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write.’

But the world is a complex place, and the finest-tipped of chisels only makes an approximate mark. An equal (maybe-not-opposite) testimony is to alert us to the false simplicities of language all around, in politics, in headlines, in clichés so oft-repeated that we no longer notice the subliminal messages they whisper in our ears. Young writers offered a chance to join in, to spin and juggle with words, become cannier readers and listeners too.

They also notice subtler moments, when something in the sound, the rhythm, can convey fine shades of feeling that the literal meaning can’t quite reach. Or that the playful words you find for something in the world outside you – say, that spidery crack inching out across the ceiling just above your head – might be saying something to you:

crash!
and I’ll let the sky in.

Those lines come from a game: to spot the unremarked details in the most ordinary room, and to give them a voice.

Because everything wants to be something.
Nothing likes being ignored.

Almost all the poems in the book are for or from writing workshops I have done in schools; some were written side by side with children as they wrote. Some pluck words out of the air from sessions where we practiced quick, light, no-wrong-answers thinking, and one jump of imagination would climb on the shoulders of another. What’s the most wonderful thing you could build a boat out of? ‘Ice,’ says someone. ‘Wind.’ ‘Snakes.’ ‘Second thoughts.’

In sessions like this, it ceases to feel as if each person has to rack their brains to find their Good Idea. Thoughts come out of the space between us, and it’s not uncommon to see a child, one who’d not thought of himself as a writer, blinking to realise what he has just said. The leader’s job is, more than anything, to create and hold that space between us, such that words can find the person who will give them voice.

Does that sound a little like a Quaker Meeting?

Only quite recently have I started to say ‘Quaker’ in accounts of myself to the poetry world, or to mention my poetry life among Friends. (And what a surprise when I did: I suddenly notice fine poet-Quakers all round.) Now I can scarcely explain what I do as a writer or as writing-educator without making the connection.

My fear used to be that people would equate ‘Quaker’ with ‘solemn’, ‘earnest’. The oxygen these poems breathe is play. Which is also a serious business. Play is how we learn, as children – and as adults too, if we don’t forget. It thrives in a safe (not bland but well-held) encouraging space. Most of all I would like these poems to be found by teachers, by parents, by Friends’ children’s meetings and anywhere that different ages meet. Most teaching of writing is a kind of folk art – ideas picked up, given a personal twist, matched to new circumstances and passed on. Apart from being a good and thought-provoking read (for all ages, I hope) that’s the fate I would like for this book.

So… a book of words, but words that are aware of silence. A book that hopes to remind young people of the rich resource of inward space, not-often-unlocked rooms inside us all, sorely needed in an age increasingly geared to self-performance, driven extraversion, living as if on reality TV…

There’s a room in my house where nobody goes.
There are cupboards and corners that nobody knows
inside me.

It is a book to be used together, but in a way that encourages everyone to become a little more themselves. Nothing in here is the last word. ‘But what can’t thou say?’ could be its motto. Those early Friends could scarcely disagree.

The boat made of poems
sings and hums and talks and whispers to itself.
It never sleeps.
It groans, it shudders to the rhythm of the waves.
Its timbers creak
in the language of every port it has put into –
the backchat, the patois,
the babble, the Babel, the smuggled rich lingo
of each dockside bar.
But hush: don’t tell the captain or the bosun
or the loosely rhyming crew:
there’s really nothing to it, poetry,
just air, hot air and paper, oh, and skill
and love and hope, between them
and the deep dark silent sea.

Philip Gross will be reading alongside Stevie Krayer, Gerard Benson, Laurence Lerner and Rosie Bailey in a celebration of UA Fanthorpe’s poetry at Woodbrooke, Sunday 22 August 2010, 2pm to 4pm.

Off Road To Everywhere is published by Salt. ISBN: 978 1 84471 722 4. £6.99  

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