Idea

 

‘Listen! I have an idea’ is the subject of this year’s poetry prize. How do I teach this to sixty primary school students? By reading poems aloud, but first what is an idea? And do children have ideas? I raise these questions at a dinner party on the weekend. Friends at dinner agree, it’s a great subject, but even though we all have ideas, we don’t think of them in the abstract. I said I was helped by William Carlos Williams’ saying in his poetry “No ideas but in things.” In other words, things prompt words that reveal ideas. Young poets find poetry by using images in their own language. Our host wrestled with how thoughts expressed well are kind of the start of ideas. I introduced the oft-said concern that children simply parrot the ideas of adults, in particular their parents. Wine and conviviality got us no closer to a theory about how we write poetry about ideas. Or may did, but the wine was taking effect. Next day I asked my daughter on the phone, what is an idea? She said, after some thought, walking along the street, that an idea is when two thoughts meet, at any age. Trick being, how to present this definition of Idea to a group of under-12s? I cannot, of course, because it’s too cerebral, like thoughts and ideas in general. Some older students may respond with a poem like a philosophical argument, but most wish to say something, or else even write a poem called ‘I Have No Ideas Today’. But admittedly, thoughts meeting is often the genesis of poems, so how to make that happen. By chance, whatever chance is, over the weekend a relative gave me a spare copy of Saul Bellow’s essays. I discovered that Bellow is an intellectual who hates the word intellectual. His biographical interview ‘A Half Life’ (1990) opens “I certainly wasn’t conscious of ideas as such before I was ten. I did have ideas of some sort earlier, but they were the sort of primitive metaphysical ideas a small child has.” Asked for examples, he replies: “Sitting on a curbstone, looking at the sky, thinking: Where did it all come from? Why was I here?” I started to think that the first word in the theme was as important as the last. Listening was as much the theme as ideas. I needed to find poems for reading that showed things and that drew in the listener, whether child or adult. The theme equated poetry with the need to say something to others. If children already have ideas, whether as defined by my host on Saturday night, my daughter on her phone, or the American Nobel laureate in his interview, then those ideas will form by hearing poetry and imitating its sounds, feel, word games, subjects and so forth from their own experience. My job became one of finding poems that assisted that process, reading them out carefully, and seeing what happened next. Poems would follow, and ideas, even poems about what is an idea.