Childhood Snapshots

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Me at 6 months	Me and my Dad
Me being a bookworm	Me on holiday in Wales
Me in my leather jacket

I spent a lot of time on my own when was young, as I didn’t have any brothers or sisters. I did have lots of paper and pencils, though, and I spent my time writing stories and poems and drawing animals. Now I come to think about it, things haven’t changed very much, really… This was one of my first efforts, when I was four:

I see blue sky, I see blue –
Look over there, and you’ll see it too.

Not terribly original. By the time I was eight I’d become a little more sophisticated, and I was looking at things from my point of view. And that’s what we want in a poem – your voice, not the one you think the grown-ups want to hear. I doubt whether my teacher would have approved of this poem!

When gigglers deaden hymns of praise,
When at each other gigglers gaze –
“Moo moo, tweet tweet,”
They gasp beneath the prayers of beat.
A long and gasping, dragging prayer
Makes gigglers laugh: in front they stare.
They wait until a hymn comes round,
Then giggling is the whole hall’s sound.

I hadn’t quite grasped that you don’t repeat words if you can help it – notice the "gasp" and the "gasping". Eventually I started learning about poetry properly, and experimenting with different forms. This is a poem I wrote when I was grown up, in a verse form called a villanelle.

THE THRESHOLD 
(First published in Manifold magazine)

When I was ten I found a door.
I turned the key; there was a catch,
Once opened, there were many more.

I’d always wanted to explore -
To cure that itch I couldn’t scratch.
When I was ten I found a door.

I heard a paper lion roar;
I watched a magic molehill hatch -
Once opened, there were many more.

I learnt about an ancient law,
And how the empress met her match;
When I was ten I found a door.

I thought about it, and I saw
The worlds that I could now unlatch;
Once opened, there were many more.

I put the book down on the floor
(I’d only read the briefest snatch)
When I was ten I found a door,
Once opened, there were many more.

Can you guess what it was about? There are lots of clues, if you’ve read the right books…

A villanelle isn’t as hard to write as it looks. If you want to have a go, you need to compose the final couplet first because lots of the lines are repeated – a repeated line is called a refrain – and once you’ve got those sorted half the poem has written itself. There are only two rhymes throughout the poem, so choose easy ones. The rhyming scheme goes as follows – A capital letter means the whole line is repeated, a lower case letter means just the rhyme is needed. The same letter – upper or lower case – means it rhymes. So once I’d written the last two lines, the poem looked like this ->

Poets often use rhyming dictionaries, to save time and to give them new ideas. If you don’t have a rhyming dictionary, you can make one. Go to Turpsik’s Poetry Page to find out how.