ABSTRACT
I have been teaching poetry – mostly to primary school children, but also to secondary students, and sometimes to adults – ever since my rst teaching practice more than four decades ago. Doing this has almost always, at some point, made me laugh inwardly (and sometimes outwardly) for simple happiness. Dylan Thomas said somewhere that poetry made his toenails twinkle. This phrase, twee as a Clinton birthday card for your ‘nanna’s ninetieth’, is hard to bear, of course. But I know what he meant: there is in the reading of poetry (what he was talking about) and in the teaching of it (what I am writing about in this part of my book) a thrill that often manifests itself in physical ways. Some people report the hairs on the back of the neck being raised. Others report (I have never felt this, nor would I want to) ‘my head being blown away’.
