ABSTRACT
If I were to try to sum up all I have written so far, I would use the words of D H Lawrence, who says that ‘the essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention and “discovers” a new world within the known world’ (quoted in Benton and Fox 1985). I would hold on to that word ‘attention’ like a shipwrecked Titanic passenger holding on to whatever shard of floating wood he or she can find. Education is attention: first, the child’s to the teacher. That is conventional wisdom – ‘Will you be quiet while I do the register!’ – and need not detain us here. Second, education is the teacher’s attention to the child. That, of course, is less understood, and bears some serious reflection. Third, there is both the teacher’s and the child’s attention to the matter in hand. And the most important attention is the writer’s, whoever s/he may be, teacher or child, to the language, the medium through which the electrical charges flicker as the learning magically happens. So this chapter is, of course, about poetry that is written with learning in mind, as are all the chapters in this book.
