Poems that work with teenagers

Subject is the test teachers reach for first and it is the least reliable of the 4. A poem about adolescence written by a 60 year old is often unbearable to an actual 16 year old, and a poem about a garden gate can land like a brick if the writing is good enough. What follows is a way of choosing, and the poems named are named as examples of each test rather than as a canon.

The 4 tests

The 4 tests are applied in order, and a poem that fails the first one is not rescued by passing the other 3. Run them before the lesson, out loud, with a clock.

1. Can it be heard once? Read it aloud at speaking pace and time it. Under 2 minutes is safe, and that is roughly 25 to 40 lines depending on the poem.
2. Does it survive a bad reading? Read it flatly and badly on purpose. If it still works, it will work when a nervous student reads it in week 3.
3. Does the room recognise the situation? Not the theme, the situation: a person waiting, a person being told something, a person leaving.
4. Is there something to take? One repeated phrase, one list, one image doing the work of a paragraph, that the class can use in their own draft before the bell.

Short enough to hear once

Short enough to hear once is a harder constraint than it sounds, because a poem that takes 4 minutes aloud has spent the room's attention before its ending arrives. Gwendolyn Brooks wrote 8 lines in We Real Cool and got more out of them than most poems manage in 80. Carl Sandburg's Fog is 6 lines. Langston Hughes rarely needed a page, which is a large part of why Mother to Son and Harlem are read in more classrooms than almost anything else written in the twentieth century.

Length also decides what you can do next. A poem heard in 90 seconds can be heard twice inside a 10 minute teaching point, and hearing it twice is what turns it from a rumour into a text. A long poem can only be heard once, which means the discussion is about what people half remember. Where a longer piece is worth the time, read one section rather than apologising through the whole thing.

Poems that survive being read badly

A poem survives a bad reading when the structure carries it: repetition, a refrain, a strong rhythm, a story with an order to it, or a voice speaking to somebody. Jabberwocky survives anything, which is why it is worth using with a group that thinks poetry is about being clever, since a dictionary is no help with half the words and the poem is still perfectly clear. Ballads and narrative poems survive because a story pulls a listener forward whatever the reader does.

What does not survive a bad reading is a poem whose effect depends on syntax. Emily Dickinson is superb and is difficult in the mouth, because the sentence is doing something unusual and a hesitant reader breaks it. Keep those for reading on the page and put the durable ones in the air. The same rule decides which poems a student can perform: work written for the ear, by poets such as John Agard, Grace Nichols, Benjamin Zephaniah and Kae Tempest, holds up under a shaking voice in a way that page poetry frequently does not.

Subjects a 15 year old recognises

The subjects that land are specific situations rather than large abstractions, and 5 of them do most of the work in a workshop: being spoken to by an adult, waiting for something to be decided by somebody else, a place you know too well, an object that belongs to someone else, and leaving. Verse novels are the easiest way into all 5 with a reluctant group, because they read like a story and turn out to be poems.

Anthologies are the other reliable route, because they let a room hear 6 poets in a fortnight rather than 1 poet for a term. The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, and Staying Alive, edited by Neil Astley for Bloodaxe, are the 2 collections most often found in an English department stock cupboard already, and both are arranged for reading rather than for study.

Why half the search results die in the room

Searching for poetry for young people returns a particular set of names, and it is worth knowing why. The Poetry for Young People series prints illustrated selections of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Rudyard Kipling and Lewis Carroll, and it is aimed at roughly 8 to 12 year olds. Handing a 15 year old a book with pictures in it says something the teacher did not mean to say.

Some of those poets still work with older students on the strength of their nerve. Longfellow tells a story at a gallop. Kipling in If is a useful lesson precisely because a room will argue with it, which is a better use of a famous poem than admiring it. What consistently fails is any poem whose main business is instructing a young person how to be, delivered in diction 100 years out of date, which is a fair description of a large slice of what a search returns. Teaching poetry covers how to read whichever poem you choose so that it gets a fair hearing.

The poem that lands too close to home

A poem lands too close to home when somebody in the room is living in it, and the way to handle that is to decide before the lesson rather than during it. Say what the poem is about before reading it, in one plain sentence. Give a stated way out that needs no explanation, which is usually a task in the corridor or the library that has been arranged in advance. And never hand that poem to the student it is about to read aloud. The safeguarding side of this, including what to do when a poem stops being a poem and becomes a disclosure, is set out on Running poetry with young people.

• Name the content in advance rather than after: the surprise is the part that does the damage.
• Keep the discussion on the poem, not on whether anybody present has experienced it, and shut down the question if the room asks it.
• Expect the writing to follow the reading: a poem about a hospital produces poems about hospitals, which is what it is for and is also the reason the safeguarding route matters.
• Treat a disclosure as a disclosure: pass it to the named person the same day, in the words the writer used, rather than keeping the poem.

Do not solve this by choosing only safe poems. A room given nothing but weather and pets produces nothing anybody wants to hear, and Spoken word poetry has always run on the opposite instinct: that a young person has something to say that the room does not know. The claim to avoid is the therapeutic one, and The evidence, and its limits explains why an adult running a session should not make it.

How competitions change the choosing

Competitions change the choosing because they change who owns the poem. A recitation contest asks a student to perform somebody else's poem from a set anthology, so the choosing is the whole task and it is done from a fixed list, which is a genuinely useful exercise in what a poem does to a voice. A writing competition wants the student's own work, so the poems you read in the room are models rather than entries, and the ones to read are the ones with a move in them.

Two practical notes. Free entry is the norm for schemes aimed at under 18s, and any competition whose prize is the chance to buy an anthology containing your child's poem is a sales operation. And a poem written in a workshop about a real family belongs to the writer, who may not want it printed anywhere, which is a question to ask before the deadline rather than after the shortlist.