When I was younger, I wrote some poems, received praise and had them published. Then I suddenly stopped. This is the story …
I blame my English teacher at school. He was responsible for starting this all off. When I was fifteen or sixteen and still at school, our English teacher gave the class a slim book of poetry to read and study. This book was a collection of poems by Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. You can, I discover, still get a copy of the book on Amazon and, by the miracle that is the internet, here is a link.
What I liked about poetry is that it is, usually, short and you did not have to spend a lot of your teenage time reading it (unlike Conrad’s novel, Nostromo, which we also had to read). Of the two poets, I better liked Thom Gunn but it was a Ted Hughes poem which the English teacher selected for us to study and critique. It was a poem, if I recall correctly, about Thrushes; you know, those spotty breasted birds. There was a line in the poem which read, something like, ‘more coiled spring than living’. It was this line which prompted me to write in my critique that the poet was writing about survival rather than about twee little birds.
A few days after handing it in, I got my written critique back from the teacher. Right beside where I had cited the line from the poem, the teacher had written in big red pen the word “YES!!!” (he might have even used more exclamation marks). This was almost certainly the first and best remark I had ever received from this English teacher, possibly from any teacher.
At the end of the lesson, the teacher called me over to his desk and said “Well done, Woods. “, all the teachers used pupils’ surnames in those days, “that was the best response from anyone in the class to that poem.”
“thank you, sir.” All the pupils called teachers ‘sir’ or ‘miss’ then.
“Do you enjoy the poetry?”
“Yes, sir.” I creepishly replied. “ I have even written some myself.”
“Really. I’d love to read some of those if I may?”
“Yes sir, I’ll bring them in tomorrow.”
“And how are you getting on with Nostromo?”
Oh, why did he have to go and ruin things ….
Reading this, you have probably gotten the impression that I was a real ‘teachers pet’ when at school. Nothing could be further from the truth. This was very much a change from the usual low grades, sarcastic comments and general failure I experienced at school.
The next day, feeling a little embarrassed, I took in my large ring binder in which I had stored the only copies of my poems. Each one had been nicely typed on an old Swiss portable typewriter. At the end of the English lesson, I stayed behind for a few extra minutes then went up and handed my work, my ‘oeuvre’, over to the teacher.
… to be continued.
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