My ESOL class at Action Foundation are wonderful. We have lots of fun, sometimes with poetry. We welcomed poet Mymona Bibi into class last month and students relished writing and sharing in their home languages.
This week the tables were turned as we set the class the task of writing a poem for Valentine’s Day – in English. Action Foundation wanted us to do this to contribute to a campaign by Together With Refugees, a coalition of organisations big and small who believe in showing compassion for people fleeing war, persecution or violence. The objective was to be able to share with the wider public something of the refugee experience. Who and what do refugees and asylum seekers love? Can a conversation about that help us find connection and understanding?
Asking people to write a poem can be terrifying. Even if you know what you want to write about, it feels like there are so many things to get wrong, so many techniques, so much vocabulary. So imagine being asked to write a poem in a language you’re not comfortable with. It takes guts even to try.
That’s why I began with what we call scaffolding, reminding the students of language they already know, and giving them ideas for how to structure their words. What we often think of as barriers to writing poetry are actually superpowers. Structure, for example, isn’t so much an extra technique to think about but rather it gives you a framework that holds you up as you work out what you want to write.
After revising the ways we use in English to compare things, we looked at Wendy Cope’s Valentine’s poem Giving Up Smoking, in which Wendy tells someone she likes them more than I would like to have a cigarette. The class thought about what they loved more – and wrote about it.
When people come to English class they are often preoccupied with getting it right. They love it when we have clear grammar rules to teach and are understandably frustrated that so few rules in English work properly – think of the rule i before e except after c, which I bet you learned, before later finding out that it is so not true that there are actually more cie words than cei ones! In class we can become fixated on how to say things, and that can make us think we’re not yet equipped enough to try to say what we really want to say. Of course that can be true for our home language too – how many times have we struggled to find the words to say something important?
It may seem odd but doing poetry in class actually seems to help overcome this problem. This week my class wrote about things they really care about, rather than trying to order the words of a sentence about Snaffles the puppy (who doesn’t exist) and his daily walk in the park. Some students dived right in, others stared at their notebooks for a bit. Some wrote about huge topics like family and unrequited love, others tackled vital issues like which sort of chocolate is the best. Some used the structure we’d looked at, others went their own way. All were wrestling with English for a purpose more critical than getting it right. Everyone was engaging with English in a different way, using different parts of their brains and their hearts, experiencing a truly lively relationship with language. You can see this in the poems they produced, which contain language we certainly haven’t covered in class – my tastebuds explode, a dreamy river. There are words in your head that you don’t even know are there!
When we read out our poems, there were nods and laughter – and the odd tear – and we connected through our different stories and cultures. Language is words and meaning and grammar – and more. Language is a string of connection and it works in many ways. This week we strung strings across our classroom and it was very exciting.
Throughout Valentine’s weekend there’s the chance for more strings to be strung. The Bound, Whitley Bay’s independent bookshop, is displaying our poems in its window. As people pass by, or come into the bookshop, they’ll be able to see what the students have written and perhaps find connections. With the mother who writes about the effect the beach has on her children. With the poet comparing the joys of fish and chips with those of sashimi. With the appreciation of the beauty of the Tyne alongside yearning for the Satwan, the poet’s home river.
Click to find out more about Together With Refugees, Action Foundation and The Bound. And here are the rest of our Valentine’s poems.
