In the posts I was putting up before my break to work on the proofs of my new book, I had been talking quite a bit about how Paul Cookson’s British book The Works: Every Kind of Poem You Will Ever Need at School seems so different from the poetry anthologies produced by publishers in North America. After reading Cookson’s claim on his website that The Works “has sold over 200,000 copies and I think every school has one – at least one!” I’ve decided to take a closer look at it. 200,000 is a huge number of copies for a poetry anthology. If it’s even remotely close to the truth that every school has one, and even if all or even most of those schools are in the UK, that means that a lot of what British children are being invited to understand as what poetry is is based on the poems found in this one book. So what does The Works tell British youngsters about what poems are?
While the “Foreward” to The Works by Pie Corbett makes a number of statements about what poetry is and why it matters, it really isn’t all that helpful. The main claim it makes about poems is that they are various—so various that apparently the only safe thing you can say about them is that there are a lot of different kinds of them. The book offers “a lively spread of poetry,” shows “the range of what we might happily call 'poetry,’” and offers some poems “selected just for the sheer fun,” some “that are there for the pleasure of sounds in words,” and some “that are there to puzzle and intrigue.” And while “poetry is a way of capturing and recreating our lives . . . . a way of explaining the world to ourselves and ourselves to the world, “that means mainly that it is, once more, very diverse: “this book takes in all aspects of our lives—the many different voices and ideas show the full range of human experience.” The claim that poetry explains things to us is undermined by a focus on the vast range of things that humans experience.
But despite all the insistence on poetry being a lot of different things, Corbett’s “Foreword” does end with a paradoxical but firm statement about exactly what it is: “In the end poetry is a serious game. Step inside this book—and play.” But even here, the focus on playing is fairly seriously challenged by a contradictory focus on the serious usefulness of the games being played—the insistence in blurbs and elsewhere that the playful contents of The Works have been packaged here for very practical and not really all that playful purposes.
First off, there’s the name itself: I can think of at least three different meanings for the phrase “the works,” and none of them are the least bit playful.
First,“the works” are places where work happens—factories where things are manufactured, often on decidedly un-playful assembly lines. Here, though, it’s not clear what The Works as a factory might be manufacturing. Young poetry fans, maybe? If so, do the fans all emerge from the assembly line sharing the same repetitive beliefs and attitudes about poetry? And if they do, is that a good thing or a bad one?
But “the works” in reference to literature is also the range of things a writer has produced—everything the writer has ever worked on. Many books with the word “works” in their titles are multi-volume collections that profess to be “complete” works—the complete works of Shakespeare, say, or the complete works of Sir Walter Scott. And by and large, only the writing by really important writers gets issued as complete works. For me, then, the phrase “the works” evokes an image of big fat hardcover volumes full of footnotes and indexes—volumes that are demanding a lot of attention and a lot of, yes, work from readers who agree to celebrate the importance of the works they contain. The works then sound like anything but playful and anything but fun, and even a volume of children’s poems that claims to be offer opportunities for pleasurable play tends to imply an overwhelming and fatiguing degree of completeness, and also, an overwhelming and intimidating degree of serious importance, when it identifies its contents as “the works.” The poems in a volume of works are clearly there because they matter and demand respect. What fun? Not really.
The third meaning of “the works” I’m aware of is a more general reference to a large range of anything, e.g., “When I go to Europe, I’m planning to visit every single country. I want to see the works.” The sounds, once more, daunting and exhausting, an insistence on completeness that seems likely to undermine the individual pleasure of each of the different experiences it includes.
In Poetry's Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children's Poetry, Joseph Thomas builds an argument around the idea that children’s poetry in the USA exists “on a spectrum”. At one end of the spectrum is what he identifies as “official school poetry,” poems by poets like Robert Frost not specifically written for children but often shared with young people in classrooms. At the other end is “playground poetry,” the songs and rhymes often communicated orally that children share on the playgrounds outside the classroom, at the other.
More seriously adult-like poems written for children are closer to the school end of the spectrum, and more playful ones are closer to the playground end. The mention of “school” in the subtitle of The Works makes it crystal clear that it is school poetry, and the descriptions of it provided by its publishers and on booksellers’ websites make it clear that its main audience is less the children the poems claim to being intended for than the teachers who plan to share the poems with children. According to Amazon, The Works specifically offers “every kind of poem teachers could wish for all in one bumper book,” and it later adds the specific claim that The Works includes “every kind of poem you will ever need for the Literacy Hour.”
A quick Google search reveals that in England and Wales, the literacy hour is “a daily reading and writing lesson that was introduced into the national primary school curriculum in 1998 to raise standards of literacy.”
Each class has a daily timetabled hour of dedicated literacy teaching time. The hour is carefully structured to ensure a balance of whole class and differentiated group teaching. During the hour, work will cover class (shared) and group (guided) reading and writing tasks, and the focused teaching of phonics, spelling, vocabulary, handwriting, and grammar. On balance, pupils spend approximately 60% of their time being directly taught and 40% working independently. The literacy hour gives a focus for literacy teaching throughout the school, providing consistency and continuity between classes.
In the light of that requirement, it;’s not surprising that The Works includes six lesson plans.
Paradoxically, however—and in ways the might suggest a major difference between British practice and the view Thomas presents of what happens in the US— the plans tend to focus on reading poetry as a way of having fun. In his lesson plan for “Socks” by Colin West, the editor Cookson says “I like this poem” and explains why by suggesting that you read it out aloud: “Exaggerate the rhymes ands beats—and have fun with the sounds of the words.” Valerie Bloom’s lesson plan recommends a riddle poem by Nick Toczek because “riddles are an effective and pleasurable way of reinforcing lessons on personifications, metaphors, and similes.” Jan Dean’s plan recommends Shelley’s “Ozymandias” because “it sounds brilliant when you read it out” and “makes great pictures in your head.”
Beyond that, I’d guess that at least two third of the poems in The Works would be closer to the playground end of Thomas’ spectrum than what he identifies as the school end. Many of the poems were first published specifically as children’s poems, and mostly in the last half-century or so. Indeed, many of them are by Cookson himself and by a few other still-living British poets, each represented by a number of different poems. Furthermore, they represent a fairly narrow range of the poems published as being intended for children, both across time and more recently. There’s very little the might satisfy the prejudices of adults who celebrate the delightfully pure and simple innocence of childhoods. There’s next to nothing religious. And there’s not even very much of the vast body of admonitory poetry published for children in the past and still now—poems that try to teach children a dismayingly large catalogue of ways to be better.
Instead, and as the Lesson Plans suggest, the poems here are almost all meant to be fun in some way, and often, therefore funny—or at least trying to be funny. I’ll say more about that in my next post.
Meanwhile, though, the limited range of poems to be found in The Works clearly implies a surprisingly limited range of tastes and abilities in the children it hopes to introduce to poetry, and a surprisingly limited faith in the ability of young readers to move beyond the limitations—to learn more than they already are and know. If we assume that school is a place primarily intended for children to learn things, then the things that might be learned in a curriculum that supports what The Works teaches and the limited range of what it declares to be “every kind of poem you will ever need at school,” then it might well be, at heart, anti-educational. In entering the school and bring the fun inside, the playground may have squeezed out much of the education.