The Poetry Society Celebrating our centenary

"Bonjour."

"Ça va?"

It’s great to be back in France. A brisk ten-minute walk from my hotel and through the market, calling at a boulangerie for two breakfast croissants, and I reach the school where I am to run a poetry workshop. It's a bilingual school, English and French, but the security woman peering out of the small window by the gate knows little English. Signing my name in the visitor's book is fine. Explaining why I'm there takes a little longer.

Jöelle, the head of the English faculty, sees me struggling and comes out into the rain to rescue me. She takes me to the room where I'll be running the workshop. We arrange the tables around three sides of a square and Jöelle fetches me a coffee. I notice that they have an old-fashioned blackboard and chalk. The school is unusual in that it teaches one and a half hours of English a day. There are fifteen teachers, most of whom have English as their first language. The workshop runs from around 9.15am until 1pm.

I begin by reading a few of my poems. I love reading children's poems to adults when they have given themselves permission to enjoy them. Then we set to work with a warm-up exercise. I ask them to think about someone they know very well. I ask them to imagine this person's physical characteristics, their personality and to think about their relationship to this person. They then have to write as much as they can in four minutes. There are four rules to abide by. 1 - Writing must be continuous - the pen mustn't stop moving. 2 Writing must only reach two thirds of the way across the page. 3 Lines mustn't rhyme. 4 I tell them that no one will see their work. I say Ready Steady Go and everyone begins writing furiously. This exercise often produces some excellent text that can be used as the basis of a poem but more importantly is great for combatting blank page syndrome. The idea comes from Peter and Ann Sansom and can be found in The Poetry Society's Jumpstart Poetry in the Secondary School by Cliff Yates.

The warm up is a great success, and we then go through some exercises for kindergarten. We decide to break early for coffee. This means getting to the staff room, and therefore the biscuits, before the French staff. These little things matter somehow.

After the break, we try three more exercises for older children. The third is quite sophisticated and designed for year 5s and above. We look at This Is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams. I write the poem on the board and I ask for suggestions as to what the poem means. As with most good poems, there's more to the poem than meets the eye. We talk about its simple style and about its hidden message. Then I ask everyone to write a poem which apologises for something they once did wrong but subtly conveys the fact that they're not really sorry at all. This poem can often lead to a discussion of What is Poetry anyway? It's a version of the exercise by Kenneth Koch in his classic Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?

We finish the morning with a discussion about what we've done and how the exercises can be used in their school. I would like to share some of our writing but we run out of time. I ask them to write down three things they've found useful in the session.

Several teachers said they liked the idea of using a model as a poem, enjoyed the brainstorming exercises and found the idea that poetry can be very simple useful. One teacher wrote - I will definitely think of my family in a different way having worked out that my mother is a parrot and my brother is an otter. Another wrote - Today I learnt some new ways to teach poetry. Can't wait to try them out. I was very pleased with the session.

As always, I stress that writing and reading poetry for this age of child must be fun. I want children to grow up with a positive feeling about it. Not that it's something you study at school and then never read again.