Are you a poet?

It may be a cliché, but typically many teenagers privately try and condense the strong emotions they experience into a concise form of meaningful words – a poem.

What they write may not rhyme or have a clear beat, but it qualifies as a poem, particularly if it’s something which has been shaped and modified in order to most aptly convey or make sense of the situations that have impacted them.

Why do we do this?

Poems and/or song lyrics have a way of summing up an experience, of making it count. The thrill of attraction, the powerful crush of isolation, the anger and confusion when a family splits up, the wing-beat desire to escape our circumstances – in situations like these which threaten to overwhelm us, writing a poem enables us to find a voice. Very often we never share what we have created but it serves as a marker of what we have come through.

Shared experience

Of course, if we do ever pluck up the courage to let others see what we’ve written, we usually discover that they can relate to it. Our voice may be unique, but our humanity is shared. Last week’s World Poetry Day (21.3.13) highlighted this very idea.

According to the Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova:

‘Poetry is one of the purest expressions of linguistic freedom. … poetry is a journey – not in a
dream world, but often close to individual emotions, aspirations and hopes.’
But Bokova stresses that poems go beyond individual experiences:
‘Poetry is a component of the identity of peoples .. [it] gives form to their dreams and
expresses their spirituality in the strongest terms - it emboldens all of us also to change the
world.’

Poetry at A Level

When we study poems written through the centuries, what we encounter are voices declaring what
the writers feel are vital messages, poets reaching out to connect to their original audience and
subsequently to us:

• Wordsworth wants us to experience the sublime
• Herbert wants us to encounter God
• Blake wants us share his protest over hypocrisy
• Hopkins wants us to understand both ecstasy and the Dark Night of the Soul.

Each are seeking some way to renew their culture and ‘change the world.’

Although some references are now opaque to us (which is what Crossref-it.info tries to address), their human voice is as immediate and important as the contemporary experience we pour into our own poems.

Add your voice

Last week’s message was that the ‘power of poetry is transmitted from generation to generation, in the hallowed texts of great authors and in the works of anonymous poets.’ Poetry is ‘a source of linguistic wealth and dialogue’ that ‘embodies the creative energy of culture, for it can be continuously renewed.’

So let’s add our voice to that stream of powerful expression. Let’s keep – or start – writing!

Studying Frankenstein?

Crossref-it.info has released another reading plan to help you get thoroughly up to speed with Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein.

Where to go

You’ll need to access the Crossref-it.info Google Chrome app. To do this, you must first install the Crossref-it.info English Literature app from the Chrome Webstore using the Google Chrome browser. Once you’ve signed in, you can do any or all of the following, earning virtual rewards as you go:

• Test yourself on what happens in each chapter with easy multiple choice questions
  For example, in Vol. 1 ch. 3, what does Frankenstein study in order to understand the cause of life?
  Is it:
  • a) How bodies decay
  • b) Electricity
  • c) Childbirth or
  • d) Gaseous exchange
    
    You can find out if you got the right answer below, but, even if you don’t get everything accurate first time, the revision app tells you how you’ve done and gives you the chance to try again, also pointing you in the right direction to get the correct answer.

• Go up a level and investigate what connections you can make to the novel
  • Of course it is how you interact with Shelley’s novel which really demonstrates your skill as a student. But where do you start when you need to make your own notes? The investigative questions at this level will help you focus on what is important, so that when you look back at your answers you’ll have a really helpful summary for revision.

• Pull what you know together by working through thought-provoking essay questions, then check how well you do against a professional answer.
  The Frankenstein revision and reading plan tests how well you can make use of your knowledge on three key areas:
  
  • The impact of the novel’s original social and political context
  • Mary Shelley’s use of analogies between Satan, Adam and Prometheus and characters in the story
  • The characterisation of - and relationship between - the novel’s framing narrators
    
    Perhaps you need help with one of these areas right now!

You can do it!

Working through the Crossref-it.info Frankenstein reading plan might well seem a challenge, but there’s also lots of help on hand – and all for just the cost of an average iTune (79p). Why not see how well you do?

And by the way, well done to anyone who realised that the correct answer to the first question was

a) How bodies decay!