On Sunday, April 5, Jeremy Paxman will be at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary
Festival to preside over a unique competition in the Sheldonian Theatre, at
the heart of the university. But the competitors taking the floor of
Christopher Wren's magnificent building won't be the nation's favourite
bluestocking, Gail Trimble, and her team of students/accountants, but 12
children, ranging in age from seven to 11. And these kids, seven boys and
five girls, won't be competing for a record deal, or a six-figure prize, but
for books for their school library and the chance to be the Off by Heart
champion in a poetry-recital competition. Declaiming poetry was part of the
original Olympics back when they were on Mount Olympus, and verse-recitation
competitions are held in Ireland and America, but Off by Heart, organised by
BBC Learning with my company, Silver River, is the first national
competition of this kind to be held in Britain.
The finalists, most of whom have never been to Oxford before, let alone set
foot in the Sheldonian, have come a long way in every sense - not just
geographically (one child hails from Bushmills in Northern Ireland, another
from Aberdeen, others from Lewisham, Nottingham and Barrow-in-Furness), but
also personally. These aren't the sort of kids you would necessarily expect
to make the final of a poetryreciting contest; and they are far from being
stage-school moppets. For some of them the Off by Heart competition has been
their first public performance; for others, it has been their first contact
with poetry.
Each child has gone through a lengthy selection process to get to the final,
which will appear in a BBC2 documentary on the competition to be broadcast
in May. A remarkable 1,500 schools (that's nearly 10% of the nation's
primaries) put forward a child to take part in the event - a gratifyingly
high number considering that a recent Ofsted report said that poetry was one
of the most poorly taught subjects on the curriculum. Most schools held
poetry assemblies where the children recited or performed one of 20 or so
suggested poems. These ranged from Wordsworth's I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
to Roald Dahl's The Pig, by way of TS Eliot's Macavity: The Mystery Cat and
Talking Turkeys by Benjamin Zephaniah. Children are big on brand
recognition, so, in the absence of anything from High School Musical, The
Pig was the most-recited poem by far - one little boy chose it because he
had read every single one of Dahl's stories and so thought his poetry “would
be okay”. Another boy (one of the finalists) lives on a pig farm, so he
knows that pigs can be just as intelligent as the one in the poem: “They are
very clever and can be taught to use the toilet.” Alligator, by the
Guyanese-born poet Grace Nichols, was also a hit, because, as one child put
it, of “all the snapping sounds it makes”.
Victorian favourites also had their admirers: a group of children at Earlham
Primary School in Newham, east London, where 92% of the children come from
ethnic minorities, did a rip-roaring beatbox version of The Owl and the
Pussycat by Edward Lear. Their teacher called the performers “The Bad Boys”,
and their rendition earned them a standing ovation.
At my daughter's school, the little girl who won did a word-perfect, spookily
atmospheric version of The Listeners by Walter de la Mare: “‘Is there
anybody there?' said the Traveller/Knocking on the moonlit door.” Her
friends, who had wriggled their way through the previous poems, suddenly
went still. Her mother was delighted with her success: “She's normally such
a quiet little girl, but this has brought out a different side of her.”
When you think of poetry recitals, you imagine white, middle-class children
from book-lined homes. But the reality of the Off by Heart finalists is so
much more rich and strange. Two children are from working farms, two are
from independent schools, three are bilingual, four are non-white. At first
glance, it seems extraordinary that two of them should be of Iranian
parentage, but Persia has a rich tradition of poetry (think of Rumi) and
storytelling. One of the two, a 10-year-old boy who won his heat by reciting
Eliot's Macavity: The Mystery Cat, was born in Iran, spent two years in a
refugee camp in Holland and moved here when he was four. He says that he
wants to be “a singer, and if I don't get that, a musician or maybe a
philosopher”. The other Iranian child is a little girl from Luton who did
Zephaniah's Talking Turkeys. When the two met at a preliminary workshop,
they were astonished to find another Farsi speaker there.
Another child from a rich poetic tradition is the Welsh finalist. He attends a
school where all the classes are in Welsh - except for English lessons - and
he performs regularly in eisteddfods. Other children had never performed
before. The winner of the London heat, who is half-Nigerian and, at seven,
the oldest of six children, amazed his mother by his decision to learn and
perform his poem. When he came for the first finalists' workshop, he had
already learnt three more poems from the list we had given them.
The regional heats through which all 12 came, organised by BBC Learning, were
judged by actors, teachers, librarians, and poets such as Michael Rosen (the
panel for the final will include Philip Pullman). Of course, judging poetry
recitals is not an exact science, and one of the organisers told me that
when she asked three judges for their top five, each one had a different
selection. Marks were given for performance and interpretation (not always
the same thing). Rosen looked for children that he felt had really got
inside the poem. “When you've heard The Pig being recited 30 times, and then
a child stands up and does it in a completely new way and makes you giggle,
that's talent.”
Overall, one of the salutary lessons of this competition is how easily
children learn poetry by heart. They lose points for stumbling or forgetting
their lines, but it happens surprisingly rarely. For the final, we are
asking all the contestants to learn Sea-Fever by the former poet laureate
John Masefield, and one other poem from a list of 30. We held a workshop for
the children with the memory expert Ed Cooke. He has pioneered an
active-learning technique that had all the kids rushing round the room
reciting different lines in different places. After 40 minutes, all 12 of
them had the poem pretty much word-perfect.
Of course, one of the arguments against rote learning of poetry, and the one
that has made it unfashionable in schools, is the idea that it stifles
children's creativity. But judging by the session that Zephaniah did with
our finalists, learning poetry is a conduit to writing it. After an hour
trading poems with him, they were all writing verses of their own.
Two generations ago, every child would have had their party piece: sturdy kids
standing on tables reciting Albert and the Lion for adoring adults. Off by
Heart is an attempt to revive the tradition of parlour poetry - to make
poetry a public delight rather than a purely private pleasure. If you learn
poetry as a child, it stays with you for life - having great poetry stored
in your head adds lustre to the good times and consolation to the bad times
in life. It is also the best way I know to make time pass more quickly when
you are waiting for trains, doctors or British Gas.
Poetry is the art at which the British excel; this competition, which I hope
will become an annual event, is a way of making sure it becomes a living
part of every modern child's education. It doesn't really matter who wins on
April 5, as all the children who have taken part are surely winners; to
learn a poem is to own it forever. I think there is an untapped hunger for
poetry in this country and this competition is a small step to making it
part of every child's birthright.
