Juggling with gerbils - poetry off the page - Brian Patten
Juggling with gerbils - poetry off the page - Brian Patten
The final plenary was an absolute joy. Brian Patten read to us from his repertoire of children's and adult poems. On the whole we laughed but sometimes his poems brought a tear to our eyes.
Brian immediately forced us to participate by getting the entire audience to shout 'On you marks, get set, go!' to start his reading of 'The race to get to sleep'. These was a poem about two children racing to get undressed, get into bed and go to sleep and was read in the style of a commentary on a horse race. Incidentally both children were disqualified from the race for pretending to be asleep and peeping to see it the other was still awake!
Brian used great energy and drew us all into the world of his poems. He demonstrated how poetry can be used to show use of rhythm and rhyme and the use of metaphor and allegory. He showed us how you can take key words from a poem and ask students to guess the context before hearing the poem. Brian asked an audience member, Gavin, to say 'cat' every time he paused during one poem - sometimes 'cat' meant a feline animal but most of the time it was part of a word such as 'cat - astrophy'.
We all joined in with saying 'Shhhh' as Brian recited 'Miss Shush' a moral tale about a teacher who had a habit of saying 'Shhhh' and had a sorry end for this reason! We were charmed and saddened by 'Angel Wings' which was about lost love and uplifted by 'The bee's last journey to the rose' about nonagenarian love - sadly unrequited.
This was a wonderful end to the conference involving audience participation and it was a privilege to hear Brian telling his poems.
