I find that often, it's the things you look forward to the least that you enjoy most.I was positively dreading the Words and Music concert at my school on Thursday evening. I'm not going to say it was the best experience of my life. But it was okay, at least, not as bad as I had expected.
Let me explain: every year my school has a Poet in Residence, some people go to workshops with them and write poems, these are then performed one evening alongside music composed and played by GCSE music students and anyone else who wants to join in.
Being a geek, i was doing both some Words and some Music. Neither of which were very good.
The evening was... long. But it gave me time to reflect on the fact I was actually quite lucky to be able to do it and in rehearsing for HOURS with my mental English teacher and my very stressed music teacher a confused-looking poet, i had actually learnt a lot.
This year, our Poet in Residence was Jay Bernard (here is her website). According to my mental English teacher she is "very very famous". I'm not sure about that. I'd never heard of her. However, that didn't detract from her awesomeness.
About 15 of us spent 5/6 hours dotted across a few weeks writing poems, looking at poems, reading poems, making a mess cutting up magazines and gluing them to bits of of paper (no, I didn't get that bit either) and at the end of it, I feel like I know so much more about writing. Not that I would ever consider being a poet, but it was fun and pretty useful all the same.
I feel really privileged to have been able to learn from someone who is so good at writing, so enthusiastic and positive and completely unpatronising. I wish more people i encounter had that sort of attitude towards young people.
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