Tuesday, 13 May 2014

performing poetry

Performance poetry is great for 'doing language' with classes:
Performance poetry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jay Doubleyou: poetry slams

Michael Rosen is particularly good at this sort of thing:
:: Michael Rosen - The Website ::

Performance poetry: the word of the moment


The Turner prize judges understand the thrill of the spoken word. 
I had to learn it from 400 primary school children







Vonna-Michell
Tris Vonna-Michell, a spoken word artist on the Turner prize shortlist, performs Finding Chopin 2012 at Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark. Photograph: Courtesy the Artist, Cabinet, London, and Jan Mott, Brussels






















It's not been a great week in the world of language and literature for those who want to see the modern out in the cold. First, an A-level board dared suggest that young students could explore a wide variety of written English – then the Turner prize judges put a spoken-word artist on their shortlist.

Performance poetry in Britain is flourishing. Alongside the poets with rock star status, such as John Cooper Clarke and Benjamin Zephaniah, hundreds are filling clubs and arts centres with their words. Performance poetry is not one genre. Some chant, sing and dance. Some stand rooted to the spot and stare. Some chat their way in and out of their poems like stand-ups. Some confess, some rage. Some play with words, some talk plain. The point is, it's live and in the moment.

So is this the heyday of performance poetry, the moment it finally receives the recognition and respect it has always deserved? To answer, it's worth looking at its history - and it has a long, rich but discontinuous tradition in Britain...

I learned to move from microphone poetry to public performance thanks to working alongside many of these great poets, though my wake-up moment came one day in a primary school in Kensal Rise, in London, in 1975. I started to read from my book without looking out at the hall of 400 children. Sean McErlaine, the teacher who had invited me, interrupted, calling out to the children: "No, no, no … it doesn't go like that, does it?" "Nooooooo!" they called back. And the whole school, led by Sean, chanted, wriggled and danced one of my poems back to me.

Ah, I thought: so you have to live the poem with your whole mind and body. This is why performance poetry has had not one great heyday, but many. You pass a poem to the audience through the words as embodied – literally – by the rest of your human form. And the people listening and watching come back at you in an equally embodied way.


Why performance is the embodiment of poetry | Michael Rosen | Comment is free | The Guardian
Performance poetry | Urban Undiscovered | The Guardian

Here's something on Chocolate Cake:
BBC - Learning Zone Class Clips - Michael Rosen - 'Chocolate Cake' - Literacy Video

And here's a place to go for lots of videos and downloads:
Perform-a-Poem
Resources for teachers
Video resources
Short films to help with planning and performances
Michael Rosen runs a poetry workshop in school
Year 6 pupils at Tidemill School in Deptford spent a morning writing poetry with Michael Rosen. Play the video to see how Michael helps and inspires the children to create their poems

Michael Rosen’s poem
Michael Rosen performs his poem 'Hand on the Bridge' at Tidemill School

Teachers on Perform-a-Poem
Richard Graham, Gemma Clark and Rachel Smith from Tidemill School discuss the impact of poetry and performance in the classroom

Michael Rosen’s poetry workshop lesson plan (PDF)
A summary of the content of Michael’s session at Tidemill School and how he structured the lesson

Uploading videos
A step-by-step video guide to make uploading easy
Perform-a-Poem - resources

Out of copyright poems

The best source of out of copyright poems for pupils to perform isProject Gutenberg - the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks, on the internet.

Below you can find the following poetry books suitable for children:

Hilaire Belloc
Cautionary Tales for Children
The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts
More Beasts (For Worse Children)

William Blake 
Songs of Innocence and Experience

Lewis Carroll 
Phantasmagoria and Other Poems

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Kate Greenaway 
Under the Window: Pictures and Rhymes for Children

Rudyard Kipling 
If

Edward Lear 
The Book of Nonsense
Nonsense Songs
The Owl and the Pussycat

Walter de la Mare 
Peacock Pie, a Book of Rhymes
Songs of Childhood
The Listeners and Other Poems

Palgrave’s 
The Golden Treasury

Robert Louis Stevenson 
A Child’s Garden of Verses


Perform-a-Poem - poems to perform
.
.
.

No comments: