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Do You Talk to Your Pets? Do you talk to your pets? Or even if you don’t talk to them, do you sometimes imagine yourself having conversations with them? Or perhaps you try to imagine what they’re thinking when they look at you or jump on you? We’ve got two cats, Jack and Meg, and I often imagine myself talking ...read more
What Are Your First Memories? One of my memories is sitting on a beach, thinking it was too hot and I didn’t like sand! How can you write about that? One way is to just pick out those two words, ‘hot’ and ‘sand’ and repeat them. Like this: Hot, hot, hot, hot, hot. Sand, sand, sand, sand, sand. Hot ...read more
A Running Away Poem This is part of a poem or narrative that I’ve written for some Year 11 dance students at a school in Cambridge. They’re going to devise a dance about Oscar and Rachel, who are my father’s uncle and aunt. While you’re reading this, you might want to imagine two people, one Oscar, one Rachel. They are ...read more
‘Thoughts’ Rather Than ‘Poems’… I’ve done a book called Pebbles (Smokestack Books). It’s made up of what we can call ‘thoughts’ rather than ‘poems’. What I tried to do was grab things that I heard saw remembered imagined and thought about. Each time I came up with something, I just wrote it down, often in ‘lines’ as you find in ...read more
If you change the shape of how you write, it can change the way you think and it can change the effect that the poem has on the way you read it and the way that other people read it. One way to do this, is to try writing something with one word per line.
You could say that this is a poem about being in water. That’s what it looks like. But what if we said that it’s not a poem about being in water. What would you say it’s about then? Whatever you think of that’s different from being in water, but still fits the words, will be OK. It also means that you’re saying that the words of the poem ‘stand in’ for other words...
What would you say to a bumble bee, or any bee? Or a wasp? Or an ant? Or a worm? Have you ever been stung by a wasp? You could imagine yourself back to that moment, and you could write a little poem of what you want to say to that wasp just after it’s stung you! You can make it rhyme if you like, just as I did in this little poem...
In every family there are secrets. Sometimes these secrets are connected to a photo, or a picture or a thing that is kept in a cupboard or a box...
Every day, the poet Ian McMillan does a tweet of what he sees on his ‘strolls’. This is the one from August 29 2022...
The idea behind this poem is that a pet has thoughts about the person looking after it. Our cat loves sitting on our laps. So I thought about how the cat might think of what it feels like when I get up...