Poetry can move souls and thrum hearts: why wouldn’t we teach our children about it?
Schools are facing considerable barriers to teaching poetry in the classroom. That’s according to a new survey from the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education and Macmillan Children’s Books – the findings of which come as little surprise to me.
I have worked with many student teachers and spoken at many teacher conferences where it’s clear that it is often a struggle to fit poetry into the classroom day. What a shame that is. We all instinctively know the power of poetry – it is the medium we turn to at weddings and funerals and new births, we know that it speaks to something deep within us and yet, on the whole, poetry tends to get forgotten until those times when we need it, and nothing else will do.
I often talk about the baggage that comes with poetry – the idea that it is to be analysed and studied and that there is a correct answer to its interpretation. But there is no right answer to a poem, other than the one it whispers to our souls. My own memories of poetry in the classroom are of analysing the poems of Sylvia Plath. I enjoyed it, but analysis alone can disconnect us from our enjoyment of reading a good poem. Striving to second guess a poet’s intent without allowing time and space to find a poem or poet that speaks to you, for me, misses the point.
Long before I was a published poet, I used to go into schools to help get young people excited about poetry. I learned that the best way to do this was by sharing the joy I feel through writing it. By allowing young people to really engage with poetry in that way you open up a space of appreciation for the poems of others. Through writing poetry I learned how wonderfully brilliant Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night truly is – have a go at writing your own villanelle and its genius opens itself up to you.
Engaging in free-write exercises (where you let the pen journey across the page, writing whatever comes to mind) reveals a deeper appreciation for Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. By showing children that their thoughts and feelings and opinions are worthy of poems, you give them a seat at the table.
When I started looking to get my first poetry collection published, I was told there was really only one place to send it. Now publishers produce more poetry for a range of ages in the form of anthologies, like Courage in a Poem by Caterpillar Books, along with single collections like Matt Goodfellow’s Let’s Chase Stars Together (Bloomsbury) and Alex Wharton’s Daydreams and Jelly Beans, illustrated by Katy Riddell (Firefly Press). It’s an exciting time for us to renew our focus on poetry in the classroom.
I often receive messages from schools, sharing pupils’ poems inspired by my own. Poems about pets and blocks of flats and emotions and animals. There is some great work being done by some brilliant teachers out there, but more resources and support are needed.
It was because of my awareness of the back seat that poetry has traditionally taken that I have made it a large part of my tenure as Waterstones children’s laureate. My Poetry Prompts videos go live on the BookTrust website every Monday morning, each one offering students a fun way to start a poem. By the time my tenure is over, there will be at least 80 of these free poetry resources for teachers to use in the classroom to get children writing and appreciating poetry. And there are other resources too: activities, teachers’ kits and recorded poems that anyone can find online.
Despite the issues in the classroom, this is an exciting time for poetry. I really hope that with some easy-to-find resources and a better awareness of how it can be taught, poetry can gain its rightful place as a staple in all our classrooms; as a way to show children how their words, their worlds, their thoughts and their opinions have the power to move souls and thrum hearts.
Joseph Coelho is a performance poet, playwright and children’s author – and the Waterstones children’s laureate 2022-24
mitted to the idea of his character as a show pony with delusions of being a stallion. “James is arm candy. His wife buys him all these expensive clothes. The two of them look like something out of a travel brochure: the perfect couple on vacation. And he’s trying to play that part while wanting also to be this serious author. But he’s not a Charles Bukowski, he’s not tormented and twisted. He isn’t in touch with the darker side of his personality.”
That changes when James finds himself facing the death penalty after accidentally killing a local farmer. He is assured by the police that there is a way out: for a hefty price, a clone of him can be created to take the fall on his behalf. This is no dumb beast, however; the sacrificial lamb will possess all his memories and feelings. It will, in effect, be indistinguishable from him. In a film featuring explicit sex and violence, there is still nothing quite as unnerving as the moment James encounters his own double as it wakes with a shocked gasp in a vat of red goo.
“The film company gave me a prosthetic of the clone’s face with all that goo round it,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s incredibly disturbing. What am I meant to do with it? Should I just hang it on the wall? Put it in the fridge?” He decided to go down the practical joke route. “When I have guests over, I’ll hide it in different places around the house.”
Would he take the clone option himself, I wonder? “One hundred per cent! I don’t blame James for going to the ATM. But it opens up other questions. If the clone retains all his memories, then how will he ever know that he is not the clone? Maybe they’re killing the real James. That fascinated me, and I love that there’s no answer in the movie. To throw another wrench in the works: maybe James has even been to the island already. Maybe he’s done this sort of thing before.”
These questions of authenticity, dilution and duplication are especially intriguing for an actor who proposed that twisted alternate version of himself in Atlanta, and who claims to suffer even now from impostor syndrome. Had you been present in 2008 on the set of Generation Kill, the HBO Iraq war mini-series written by the creators of The Wire and shot in Namibia, Mozambique and South Africa, you might have noticed him sitting off to one side between takes, quietly totting up figures with a pen and paper. “It was my first big job,” he explains. “I was so convinced they were going to fire me that I started calculating the cost of recasting the role once they realised I wasn’t good enough. A month or two in, I was still convinced that every time the phone rang, it was my agent saying: ‘Pack your bags, you’re not cutting it.’ It was only when we’d done some big battle scenes that I knew it would be too expensive to replace me.”
It wasn’t as if he has a history of flunking, though there was the job in the Stockholm bakery that he was sacked from at the age of 16. “We were dipping little biscuits in chocolate for six hours a day in a basement and that was the only thing we got to do,” he says pleadingly, as though mounting the case for his defence. “When you get chocolate on your fingers, it’s tempting to put little stains on your buddy’s white robes. That turned into a bit of a food fight.” He smiles bashfully. Chocolate wouldn’t melt in his mouth.
A few years earlier, he had abandoned a childhood acting career after feeling freaked out by all the attention he received. “When people recognised me, or I thought they did, it made me very uncomfortable. I also believed everything I heard about who I was. Most people at 13 have no idea who they are. I was going from a boy to a man, which is a crazy transformation anyway, but to do it while being in the spotlight was not healthy. That’s why I didn’t work for eight years.” What could he learn now as an actor from his younger self? “There was a lot of joy,” he says. “That makes me sound bitter now! But there was something innocent and lovely and wide-eyed. It’s worth remembering that it can still be a big silly game.”
His continuing appetite for comedy bears this out. He was a riot in the opening episode of On Becoming a God in Central Florida, where he played a dope who gets involved with a pyramid scheme before being eaten by an alligator. (His on-screen wife was Kirsten Dunst. For further proof that their marriages never end well, see Von Trier’s apocalyptic Melancholia.) He also goofs around gloriously in the new season of Documentary Now!, in which he stars as a Werner Herzog-esque director shooting an epic in the Urals while simultaneously showrunning a US network comedy pilot called Bachelor Nanny. “I’ve met Herzog a few times over the years, but I don’t know if he’s seen this yet,” he says, slightly sheepishly. “I’m curious to hear what he thinks.”
It was in fact comedy that tempted Skarsgård back to acting again after all those years away. He was on holiday in Los Angeles in the early 00s when his father’s agent suggested he try out for an audition. Six weeks later, he was pootling around New York in the back of a Jeep with Ben Stiller, pouting away happily as gormless Swedish model Meekus in Zoolander. Getting that job was such a breeze that he was crestfallen to be knocked back repeatedly in other Hollywood auditions. He returned to Sweden to continue acting; another six years elapsed before Generation Kill kickstarted his US career.
These days, he seems somehow both ubiquitous and judicious. He is getting ready to make his directorial debut with The Pack, in which he and Florence Pugh star as documentary makers in Alaska. And he will return this month in the fourth and final season of Succession, which reportedly places even greater emphasis on Skarsgård’s character, the tech bro Lukas Matsson. Another bad boy of sorts.
“Quite a few of the projects I’ve chosen deal with the juxtaposition of someone trying to function in modern society while also dealing with that atavistic primal question of who he is deep down and what happens when that flares up and can’t be suppressed any longer,” he says. “It’s incredibly cathartic to play those roles. Maybe because I’m quite mellow in my disposition. These darker, more twisted characters give me an opportunity to howl that primal scream and let it out, which I rarely do in everyday life.”
James in Infinity Pool has his head turned by the tiniest compliment; Skarsgård knows that, for all his own protestations about refusing to read what is written about him, he is just as susceptible to praise. “I really don’t read reviews,” he says. “That said, it’s so nice when people enjoy your work enough to come say something or take a photo. I’d prefer that to the alternative, which is crawling around in the mud for seven months and giving it everything and then it’s just … crickets. I like people appreciating what I’ve done. I’m a vain motherfucker!”
• Infinity Pool is released on 24 March. The new series of Succession is on Sky Atlantic and NOW on 27 March.
Nixon, a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a leader isolated by scandal rather than the leftwing broadside that people might have expected. Through Stone’s lens, the Iraq war was reduced to the unfortunate collateral damage of a father-son relationship.
Another biopic, Adam McKay’s semi-satirical Vice, spent less time on Iraq than W in arguing that Dick Cheney, another wayward Ivy Leaguer with a drinking problem, sobered up in time to play puppet master to Bush through various disasters, of which Iraq was only one. But McKay at least engaged with the dangers of an unchecked executive power, which allows presidents to engineer wars like Iraq and keep the military-industrial complex humming along without an exit strategy. Yet Vice is still more a film about presidential privilege than it is about the blackest of black marks on Bush and Cheney’s record. It was never a war Hollywood could look squarely in the eye.
Rather than sort through the quagmire, the most workable solution was to take a grunt’s-eye-view of combat and the agonies of coming home. One distinguishing feature of Iraq war films that focused on the soldiers themselves was a greater understanding of post traumatic stress disorder than previous generations could process openly. Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper was the one bona fide smash about the war, in part because its subject, Navy Seal Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), could be said to have achieved a grim sort of greatness, having notched over 160 kills over four tours of Iraq. But Eastwood
does measure the human cost of Kyle struggling to adjust to civilian life afterwards, and the fact that Kyle was killed by another veteran suffering from PTSD drives the point home. Still, the film’s eagerness to print the legend, rather than address the more troubling bullet points of Kyle’s résumé, made it palatable enough to be a hit.
Other dramas from just outside the studio system chipped away at the margins, like Grace is Gone, about a widower (John Cusack) who loses his wife in Iraq and needs to reconstitute his family life around their two young daughters, or Richard Linklater’s underrated Last Flag Flying, in which a Vietnam veteran (Steve Carell) reunites with his old squad buddies (Bryan Cranston and Laurence Fishburne) to help bury his son, who has died in the latest inexplicable, open-ended war.
It had somehow become a family tradition to serve a country that wasn’t worthy of their sacrifices.
The best American drama about the Iraq war ended up a TV show and not a film – that would be HBO’s Generation Kill, a seven-part limited series about seeds of failure planted in the earliest stage of Operation Iraqi Freedom – but with a pair of documentaries, 2008’s Standard Operating Procedure and 2013’s The Unknown Known, director Errol Morris told a comprehensive story about the war and the moral rot that trickled down the chain of command.
Standard Operating Procedure investigated the notorious photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison and throws cold water on the idea that the cruelty and torture on ghoulish display could be limited to “a few bad apples”.
Morris climbed to the top of the leadership ladder with The Unknown Known, a companion piece to The Fog of War, his 2003 portrait of Robert McNamara, the former defense secretary, a chief architect of the Vietnam war. This time, he talks to Donald Rumsfeld, who shares none of McNamara’s introspection and instead smirks his way through parsed phrases, as if to cover his mistakes in a rhetorical fog of war. Critics complained that Rumsfeld, that sly fox of the Pentagon press room, had succeeded in giving Morris nothing. But there’s another word for that type of success, when you have no rationale or accountability for the grievous mistakes you’ve made: failure.