Lifesaving Poems: Carl Sandburg’s ‘Buffalo Dusk’

Apart from e e cummings and the genius Anon, one of my chief discoveries in the Voices and Junior Voices series that I … More

Lifesaving Poems: e e cummings’s ‘in Just’

I I first came across e e cummings’s ‘in Just’ in an anthology, Wordscapes, edited by Barry Maybury (OUP, 1971). … More

I first encountered Siân Hughes‘s poems sitting around a table with some talented teenage poets at the Arvon Foundation‘s writing … More

8.06 p.m. June 10th 1970poemTom Raworth (from Jumpstart, ed. Cliff Yates, Poetry Society, 1999) As I say in my previous blog post, … More

Birth of the FoalAs May was opening the rosebuds,elder and lilac beginning to bloom.it was time for the mare to … More

The funniest thing you will ever read about Elizabeth Bishop (or teaching, or anything else) is Mark Halliday‘s essay Moose … More

You make the thing because you love the thing and you love the thing because someone else loved it enough … More

Kin“You make me sick!” this, with rancor, vehemence, disgust—again, “You hear me? Sick!”with rancor, vehemence, disgust again, with rage and … More

I began writing the Lifesaving Poems posts in June 2011, back when I was using Posterous for this blog. … More

PGCE students are so dedicated. They burn with desire to be amazing. They hand in their work and have beautifully … More

‘I’ve learnt to be more confident with my ideas, because sometimes you have an idea that you just sort of … More

When I began teaching the Year 5 class of children whose work would form the basis of my doctoral study … More

Some writers influence you through the pull of their imagination on your work, opening up new worlds as you read … More

You have to hand it to Jamie Oliver for giving it a go. How he kept so positive confronting all … More

Andrew Motion is my hero because he set up the Poetry Archive with Richard Carrington. He has nothing left to prove. As … More

What Michael Gove says about trainee teachers having the opportunity to observe and learn from teachers in school is critically important. … More

‘Whenever I work with people – no matter what their age – I try to run a checklist through my mind: are … More

I love the silence that descends on a classroom full of people who are all engaged in the act of … More