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LESSON PLAN
Cliff Yates
I Remember
Transcript from:
http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/competitions/fyp/lessonplans
My name’s Cliff Yates. I’m a poet and a teacher - I teach full time English. I write poems
and I also work freelance, getting people to write, and the poem I’m going to talk about is
Abigail Maskill’s ‘I Remember’. ‘I Remember’ is a list poem; it’s one of the most potent,
accessible and exciting exercises that you can do with young people, and adults in fact. A
list poem has got a great tradition going back to the bible, probably before, and the ‘I
Remember’ form of that was invented, as far as I understand, by Joe Bremnar, the
American artist who wrote a book length version of verse poems beginning with ‘I
Remember’, and there’s a brilliant version by Paul Farley called ‘I Ran All The Way Home’
from his book Tramp In Flames. The way I would do this is I would have it with the
students doing a piece of free writing; a piece of free writing meaning they write for about
four or five minutes without stopping and when everybody’s stopped, they just write down
‘I Remember’ and carry on.
So, it becomes a kind of spring really, a real sprint, and the great advantage of free writing
is that it tends to have this fantastic effect on the writer, in that they tend to surprise
themselves by writing things they hadn’t thought about, so it does happen to generate
some really good poems. I tend to tell them that this is a kind of a warm up, an exercise
and it doesn’t matter what happens, and the reason for that is to take away the pressure.
And also I tell them that no one’s going to be forced to read back and that it doesn’t have
to be neatly written because no one’s going to mark it. So it’s just a piece of writing they’re
going to do. But under that pressure they’ve only got four/five minutes. And in that time
they just have to keep writing; as soon as they get stuck or they finish one thing then they
move on to another. And each memory, each ‘I Remember’ can be very very short, ‘I
remember matches…’ or ‘I remember sparklers…’, but then it can be much longer as well,
like Abigail varies the length of the memories in her poem.
So, this piece of free writing should be done on rough paper or in books that teachers
don’t mark so students can write whatever they want and the reason for that is also to
respect privacy and that’s why I would tell the students that I wouldn’t force them to read it
back because I want them to write without playing safe, I want them to write about what’s
important to them and to really enjoy what they’re writing. And also I’d say that if it turns
into one poem, one ‘I Remember’ poem, that’s fine. In other words, if it starts ‘I Remember’
and they start writing and that becomes one poem about the memory that is also fine. So
everything, anything, basically is okay. So then they do the free writing and after that I’ll
stop them and say okay just look back at what you’ve done here now and look at it and
think to yourself that this actually you’ve written it in one order, how it came to you, but
really what you can do now is see it as material and look at it and decide which one would
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make a really good opening and that maybe could open the poem, and then also which
one would be a really good ending, what would be a very good last line.
And start looking it in good words as a poem and as material to make something out of
which obviously is what it is at this stage. And then I would ask students if any of them
wants to read back, and that’s a good opportunity to start up a process of drafting. And
what I would focus on here would be on the detail because I think detail of this poem is
really important - it’s important in any poem but its particularly important in this one. I
would encourage them to put in more detail, so for example say things like “what kind of
car was that?” and then they would add that detail in there and put in colours and so on.
So that’s like the first stage of drafting.
One thing you can also do at this stage is have it as a group poem so you ask everyone to
write ‘I Remember’, just one of their memories on a piece of paper hand it in and then
shuffle them around then move them round a bit, and that often works really well, you get
these really fortuitous combinations – which you happen to have things together that really
do work. That’s also another opportunity to help them with drafting and editing by saying to
them if this was going to be a group poem to be published, “would be a good opening?”,
“what would be a good last line?”, “would we add anything?” and so on.
At this point possibly I might read Abigail’s poem and draw attention to, and allow them to
say, what they like about it, and draw attention again to the detail of the poem; for
example the ‘bright puce’ ‘Minnie Mouse dress’ is just a beautiful detail, because it really
throws that colour into the poem so use of detail, and mentioning Pizza Hut by name is
great, it adds some kind of historical detail. People say about John Blaynard’s poem, it’s
about the 40s and 50s, growing at that time, because he puts in detail about those times,
and their poem would obviously be about their life, and details of that life are really
important.
I talked about the way in which Abigail’s poem draws in the reader, the way sometimes
she doesn’t put in everything and that helps. So she’s got a line: ‘I remember someone
noticed I wasn’t doing too well, and I’ll always remember them for that’, which is lovely
because she doesn’t have to say what she wasn’t doing too well, and we’ve all been
through times like that so it kind of draws the reader in, we put in our bit of information into
that part of the poem and that, I think that works really well.
And the other thing that works incredibly well is her use of brackets, because brackets in a
poem, in this poem, are a way of bringing in other voices, so she has somebody now,
saying “(give me that crayon back)”. She’s back at that time, and she’s a child at that point,
which allows her to use the child voice. And there’s another bit where “I Remember with
the class four teacher with a vendetta against me and I’ll I stood for” and then in brackets
“or at least my handwriting and vacant nature” which is lovely because it suddenly sees it
slightly from the point of view of the teacher, she can understand why the teacher had a
vendetta against her so it’s a lovely way of bringing a different voice a different point of
view. The use of brackets is kind of really good in this one. For the final draft what I would
get them to do this to work on it for homework to take it home and just work on it, play with
it and then bring it in a week later. I’d get them to type it up in that time, they could do that
in fact in class, and I could help them with that. These are the kind of things I would
suggest for them, I’d suggest that they try out different lines breaks and stanza breaks and
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see what works well for that poem. It might be that they decide to have long lines or short
lines, but it really depends on what they’ve written, and again I would demonstrate this by
using examples from their own poems, from their own I Remembers. And also Abigail
centres her poem: I’d say you don’t have to do that, I tend to discourage students from
centring work because it isn’t always appropriate. So get them to look at alternatives and
you don’t have to centre it, but of course they can if they want to because it’s their poem.
They could think of maybe looking at the way Jo Bremna does it, each paragraph
beginning with one ‘I Remember’, that might work really well for theirs. I would encourage
them to add new bits, take things out and play with it; maybe just start all over again if thay
want to. And to put it in an order that sounds right, not to be tied into a chronological
development for example. Abigail’s chronology works very well, but it doesn’t have to be
like that, they can take memories from different times of their lives and put them together,
simply because the sound right together at that time, at that place in the poem.
I tell them also its okay to start again, for homework, if they don’t like what they’ve written
in class, and it can be any length, it can be a short poem or a long poem. Sometimes
when I first start teaching students poetry they’re surprised by this, a glee comes to their
eyes and they say ‘so maybe I can get away with only writing a few lines?’ and I say “yes”,
and that freedom really is an enabling thing, really sort of gives them some freedom, it
means that it creates this trust, that I’ll say ‘yeah you can get away with only writing a few
lines’, because sometimes you can spend ages a few lines, and it can be really good, and
sometimes you might want to write a longer poem, and then just actually see what comes.
And encourage them again to use names, and to use detail, and to write about things that
happened but also to be free, they can use their imagination in any way they want to,
bearing in mind of course that sometimes the truest things are often the strangest, as we
all know.
Okay, so another thing about Abigail’s poem is the fantastic pace of it, you’ve got these
very long memories, some lengthy sentences and then some short ones, the pace of it
works really well. I tell them when they’re drafting their poems to also look at the pace of it,
so to have some long sentences and to also have some quite short sentences, and break
it up like that, so the sentence becomes in fact the rhythmical entity of the poem, by which
everything else is measured. The sentences of this poem are really good, they’re worth
reading as sentences as well as parts of stanzas.
Abigail Maskill – I Remember
I remember –
In a gala field, watching a message board that I couldn’t read,
the letters flickering past, just red shapes and lines.
I remember thinking that men physically couldn’t cry,
and that babies came from mummy’s tummy via a zipped opening just above the belly
button,
and I remember thinking I could find Neverland in the Netherlands
(first country to the west and straight across the channel till dawn).
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I remember playschool –
and insisting my name was written Agail
(after all, it is my own name – I’ll write it how I like. Now give me that crayon back.)
I also remember the first day at ‘Big’ school –
and I had a Minnie Mouse dress.
Bright puce – I remember it twirling as I spun till I was dizzy in the schoolyard.
I remember being fought over and tugged between kids at breaktime, and I remember
going
for months with no one to play with.
I remember sitting on a doorstep and feeding the ‘imps’ that lived in the undergrowth just
outside the library –
I remember I must have been older than eight,
because I remember the class four teacher with the vendetta against me,
and all I stood for.
(Or at least my handwriting and vacant nature.)
I remember a horrible hoax.
I remember the fresh start, new leaf, clean slate –
I remember wanting to go to that school because it looked like Hogwarts
(nothing more, nothing less).
I also remember my first impressions of everyone who made one.
I remember now, looking back, that they were mostly right.
I remember putting parmesan and pepper in Pizza Hut ice cream, and sitting in a back garden
at midnight avoiding slugs, and singing Queen songs in a foreign country, and the locals
joining in.
I remember tears at the window of a wet paint room.
I remember streamers and party hats in the park – and remembering, I realise we must have
looked insane.
I remember a crumpled Daily Mail article that gained blotches and milkshake stains as it did
the rounds – but I remember finding it first.
I remember someone noticed I wasn’t doing too well, and I’ll always remember them for that –
and I remember long, long phone calls and sound-proofing my door.
I remember loud music, whether in the back corner of a stadium or being crushed into the
amplifiers, feeling a beat pulsate at the back of my head and sicken my stomach, and
jumping along out of time anyway.
I remember finding an old friend, quite by chance – finding we had turned out the same after
all.
I remember writing these lines –
At least five times
And remembering.