Literary Insight

Former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen visited Highgate Junior School on Friday 16 October. He provided an audience of nearly 900 local primary school children with a rare opportunity to meet one of Britain’s most popular and prolific children’s authors and to gather such an array of literary and authorial insights.

The event was hosted by Highgate Junior School with the intention of further nurturing and enhancing the collaboration between the school, St Michael’s CE Primary School, Highgate Primary School and St Joseph’s RC Primary School.

The day proved to be not only hugely popular with both the children and adults but has also stimulated a much greater interest in the complex symbiosis of processes, necessary to produce a quality work of fiction and poetry. The story-telling element of Mr Rosen’s speech was exceptionally well received and talked about for a long time afterwards.

Mr Rosen’s visit to our school was a thrilling, enriching and memorable event for all involved. He shared his love of language, the writing process and poetry with ease and captivated the children’s imaginations with humour and style.

Mr Rosen has also contributed to our ‘Highgate Pupil Anthology’, an ongoing project incorporating poems submitted by children from the above schools, by providing us with an inspirational, personalized foreword below.  VN

Foreword for poetry anthology

Poems are a special way of using words. You can use words so that they sound good. You can use the words so that they make you think in ways that you’ve never thought before. You can use the words so that they just suggest things. That means you don’t have to say everything or explain everything; you just make a hint. In poems, the words make pictures. A man called Philip Sidney called them ‘speaking paintings’. If you look closely, some of the letters, words and phrases in a poem link together. They have hidden ways of being connected to each other. I call them ‘secret strings’. I like looking for the secret strings in poems I read.

Anyone and everyone can write poems. All you need to do is give yourself a little bit of time. Sometimes, I start writing a poem when I hear a piece of music. All I do is listen and whenever a thought comes into my head, I write it down. I don’t have to write sentences, just single words or little phrases. Another thing I like doing is write down the things people say: things I hear on buses and trains, things my mother and father used to say to me and to each other. I also like writing ‘thinking’ poems. This is where I put down a ‘stream of thought’. This can be a stream of thought I had when I was, say, scared. Another kind of poem I like is when I pretend I’m a character in a book. All I have to do then is pick a moment in the story where something exciting is going on and I pretend to be the character at that moment. Then I ask myself, ‘What can I see? What can I hear? What am I thinking? How do I feel? What am I imagining?’ The answers to these questions can turn into a poem.

Other times, I like making up a ‘chorus’. That’s the bit of a song that you repeat. Once I’ve got a chorus, it helps me make a rhythm for the bits in between the chorus. So it could be a chorus about sitting about doing nothing…something like…’I’m doing nothing, and I’m doing it all day.’ Then all I have to do is say that a few times over, tapping it out. Then in between, I make up things I’m thinking or seeing or imagining. And there’s a poem.

Finally, I like ‘talking with my pen’. Here’s where I’m pretending to be talking to someone in the room. I might begin with a phrase like, ‘Hey, you never guess what?’ And then go from there. Or, ‘My Dad. Wow! Sometimes he was amazing.’ And then go from there.

I’m writing this as a foreword for a book of your poems, but I’m writing it before you’ve written them. So by the time you come to read these words, you will have made a whole book. And I’m going to bet myself that you will have come up with all sorts of ‘speaking paintings’, all sorts of rhythms, all sorts of ‘secret strings’. I’m looking forward to reading them.

Very best of luck to all the writers and readers who come to these pages.   Michael Rosen

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