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Cherry Berry | STORY | Kids' Poems and Stories With Michael Rosen
Michael Rosen performs Clever Cakes from the Book Clever Cakes
In stories, as in life, it pays to be able to think on your feet - especially if you are about to be eaten by a hungry bear! This is just one of the perils that face the clever children in these seven tales, which also feature a Devil-dog, Old Greyface the wolf, Giant Gobbleguts and Dump-demons.
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INTERVIEW with Michael
What does poetry mean to you?
It mostly means 'saying important things in small spaces'. It can also mean 'memorable speech', 'making the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar', it can mean 'finding out what a moment can come to represent' and talking of moments, poetry can be the moment that a story or a play didn't have time to tell us.
Why is poetry important for children?
Most of education is concerned with getting things finished, right and put away in exercise books. Reading and writing poetry is another way of looking at the world: it can involve being suggestive, tentative and tangential. It has the potential of raising more questions than it can answer. It can scavenge the world's utterances for material which it recycles, parodies, cuts up, re-arranges, often with the result of letting us see how language works. This means that poetry is good at revealing our deceptions, self-deceptions, exaggerations. It can also examine how it is we look at the world through language - that's to say, how we 'textualise' the world. Poetry is wonderful at both doing this but also in investigating how we do it.
Elsewhere in the curriculum, there is hardly ever time or willingness to do this. Poetry can often do it very quickly and wittily. We need it to sharpen our wits in a world in which we are constantly asked to look the other way
How would you describe your poetry?
A lot of it is interested in recounting foibles, misunderstandings, small disasters. Another chunk of it is nearer to traditional nonsense poetry. Some of it is based very strongly in people's speech.
What do you think children get from your poems?
I hope that they get to see aspects of themselves, and aspects of their parents in many of the poems. I hope that this gives them permission to have a go at writing things like that themselves and to read many other poets' poems.
Of all the poems you have written, which is your favourite?
I think it's the sequence I've called 'Michael's Big Book of Bad Things'. There are four parts to it, which I split up across 'Michael Rosen's Big Book of Bad Things'.
In this digital age, do you think technology in creating and/or promoting poetry for children?
Oh yes. I've put over 200 poems of mine on KZfaq and they've had millions of views. I also put new poems up on my website, my blog and Facebook and link to them on twitter.
What advice can you give to aspiring poets?
Find some poets and poetry you really like. Copy out or learn bits of it.
Keep a notebook of words, phrases, ideas, that you find or think of.
Read your notebook and see if it triggers off things to write.
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Who is Michael Rosen?
My first book for children was called Mind Your Own Business and it came out in 1974. Quentin Blake did wonderful line drawings for it.
Ever since then, I’ve been doing these things:
Writing books
Writing articles for newspapers and magazines
Going to schools, libraries and theatres and performing the poems in my books
Helping children write poems and stories
Making radio programmes, mostly about words, language or books
Appearing on TV, either reading books, or talking about books
Teaching at universities about children’s literature
Running workshops for teachers about poetry
In any week, I might be doing all of these things! To tell the truth, I don’t really know what I’m doing tomorrow, unless I look in my diary to see.
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