This pioneering programme seeks to give poetry a more central place in young people’s learning.
If you think poetry is dull or inaccessible – or simply too difficult – go to the Poetry Archive and listen to a poem called Childhood Tracks read by its author, James Berry. In the simplest of language he takes listeners into the world of a child in a village absorbing the smells, sounds and sights of the day - from the sound of the sea washing on the shore and ‘the dawn-crowing of cocks’ to ‘the slants of evening sun’ slowly disappearing as fisherman mend their nets.
Childhood Tracks is the first of many poems from a wide range of writers discussed in a book to be launched today, Teaching Caribbean Poetry, a collection of essays edited by Beverley Bryan of the University of the West Indies and Morag Styles of the University of Cambridge.
The book introduces secondary school teachers to a relatively new area of literature which, emerging over the last 100 years in parallel with an explosion of music, has been described as “the most life affirming and spiritually uplifting body of poetry”. Its publication reflects the determination of its editors and their contributors (who include poets as well as academics and teachers) to engage young people in the richness of poetry produced in the islands of the Caribbean and their worldwide diaspora.
Teaching Caribbean Poetry is the latest development of an ambitious collaboration initiated in 2010. The Caribbean Poetry Project brings together academics, teachers and poets from both sides of the Atlantic to share their enthusiasm for an art form that many schools, and even some universities, shy away from. The project has led to workshops and conferences, attended by poets and teachers, both in the Caribbean and in Cambridge – all held with the intention of celebrating a body of writing that has enormous vitality and emotional power.
As a pioneering programme that seeks to give poetry a more central place in young people’s learning, CCP is supported by some of the best-known champions of the art form. Guests at the book launch on 29 October 2013 included Poet Laureate Carole Ann Duffy, patron of CPP, and Sir Andrew Motion, who is one of its advisors and also director of the Poetry Archive.
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge