How To Grow Your Own Poem

Some of you may have seen in the news or on Twitter the increasing prominence of the inspirational teacher and poetry guru Kate Clanchy.  Her students have been especially active during lockdown, publishing moving and inspiring works about life during the pandemic.  Follow her on Twitter and you will get a daily offering of one of her students' poems, some of whom have gone on to win national awards.

Check out her Twitter feed here: https://twitter.com/KateClanchy1

She has published a number of books, but her most recent, How to Grow Your Own Poem promises to be both inspirational and to offer you a chance to develop your creative skills at the same time.  The poems in the book are designed to help provoke a rich response in you, the reader, and there are exercises to help you write something of your own.  Why not try it out over the coming weeks?  Please do share your creative efforts with your teachers and remember that the school's creative magazines Areo and Pandaemonium (run by Mr Gardner) are always looking for submissions.

If you're someone who prefers criticism to creativity, perhaps check out Stephen Fry's useful and accessible book, The Ode Less Travelled as an alternative.  You'll learn a lot about literary techniques as well as learning about different ways of constructing your own verse.

Book of the Week

Sing to It by Amy Hempel

Recommended by Mr Hager

'I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story.'

Amy Hempel's new collection of short stories is an, at times, moving and provocative read. It is also a quick one.

Hempel is regarded as a minimalist, although she doesn't like the term because she feels it implies that plot and detailed emotion are required in normal fiction. She is famous for the precision of her sentences and for the ways in which she often achieves her effects without creating the standard story arc, or without obvious points of tension and conflict. Some stories might feel flat as a result, or might fail, but when they work there is a sense of something quite remarkable that has been created out of almost nothing. James Wood, writing in his New Yorker review, says, 'her stories assemble extraordinary sentences. And each purified sentence is itself a story, a kind of suspended enigma.'

See if you agree, and let the Blog know which ones you thought were the best. The opening story alone is worth the price of the book, and there are other gems hidden away.

You'll also enjoy Hempel's characters' eccentricity, and the ways in which she uses the humorous and the mundane. There's a story that approaches the civil rights movement, for example, through the artwork 'Doll Tornado' that has divided critics.

If you're someone who likes to define things, then read some of Hempel's stories and decide what constitutes a short story, or a poem, or a prose poem. There's a lot of food for thought here, and some of the stories are compact enough to fit into the time between a lesson, and certainly into a couple of Pauline lunchtimes.

This week saw the announcement of the shortlist for the Booker prize, which is awarded to the best novel written in English each year. The judges - a particularly fascinating group, including poet and dramatist Lemn Sissay, Emily Wilson, translator of Homer’s Odyssey, and Lee Child, creator of modern day epic hero Jack Reacher - produced a longlist of 12 novels back in July, and they’ve now narrowed that down to the final six.

Hilary Mantel famously did the double in 2009 and 2012, by winning the prize for the first two novels in her series about Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell. Anyone hoping she might do the triple, with the final novel in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, will be sadly disappointed - she didn’t make the final cut. But you can find a list of the novels that did here - and an article about them here - and they all sound brilliant. They're all available to borrow from the Kayton Library, so get reading, and see what you think. 

Book of the Week

The Beach by Alex Garland

Recommended by Alex Kilsby

Let me start this off by saying: I’m not one for books. I’m a very picky reader. And I don’t read as often as some would like me to. So, when my mum handed me The Beach saying “Read this, or so help me god I will go nuts,” I felt I had no choice. And somehow I was so gripped by the first few chapters I just kept reading. Until, twenty four hours later, I finished it, satisfied and overjoyed with it. And let me tell you, that is incredibly rare for me.

The Beach, written in 1996 by Alex Garland, is an anti-tourism book written through the eyes of a tourist. It tells of paradise ruined by trampling feet, and westerners only looking for a good photo. A traveller who yearns for something more than a brief holiday spending the time next to noisy roads, shouting tourists and stale locations. 

Book of the Week

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Recommended by George Khairallah

It’s the weekend in England on an unpleasant winter day with the wind howling outside. With nothing much to do and my brother reading, I searched my bookshelf looking for a good book to delve into, and that is how I found Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, a semi-autobiographical story recommended to me by my mom and grandparents.

I had never before heard of this book and only knew that it seemed to be a classic book, written about the author’s childhood growing up in the slums of Brooklyn. I was intrigued and so, with nothing better to do, I started to read.

Welcome back!

This time last year, our first Book Blog post of the term observed that the past few days had been a bit 'turbulent' (suspension of Parliament/heatwave - remember all that?).  We had no idea ... 

But now we're back! And what better way to celebrate the start of term than by submitting a post to the Book Blog? We publish twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, and posts can be anything book-related. Tuesday is usually our 'Book of the Week' slot, and features a book review - fiction or non-fiction, anything you've enjoyed reading. We publish creative writing, host polls and even run the occasional quiz: you can find out more about what the blog does here.  

We've also got booklists, organised by theme or by subject: and we're always happy to add any recommendations you might suggest.  Everyone is welcome to contribute - students, teachers, parents: all you have to do is e-mail your post to us at spsbookblog@stpaulsschool.org.uk.  

So whatever zone you're in, get writing, and tell us all about the books that pop your particular bubble: we'd love to hear from you, and have a wonderful term!