When my school shut down, poetry helped me cope

Young people have lost the support of teachers and classmates during the lockdown
PA
Linnet Drury16 June 2020
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I have been writing poetry for five years, since I started secondary school, and my writing has grown under the guidance of our teacher Kate Clanchy, who was writer in residence at Oxford Spires Academy.

Through her workshops, it really turned it into a “poetry school” — Kate often says if every comprehensive had a resident poet, imagine how many poets there would be.

The moment I really started to enjoy writing was when I realised that the best poetry is not just making up other people’s stories, but writing about your own.

Poetry became a way to channel my everyday feelings, note down little details, and capture moments or people in my life.

Poetry is not an old stuffy form, but with its short constructed bursts, it is a living dynamic way to capture the language and form of our modern world.

Being able to concentrate a situation into a poem can be therapeutic, which has never been so important.

As the country locked down and work and school moved online, so did our poetry workshops — onto Zoom.

Over the last few months we have met twice a week and we all say it’s kept us sane.

This crisis has affected everyone, and it has hit young people very hard.

The shock of schools suddenly closing plunged us in head-first without the support of our teachers and classmates.

Without the time to adjust it became isolating, unable to see friends again and having the extra burdens of timetabling, studying, and teaching ourselves.

This, heightened by the surreal urban changes such as clear roads, silence and the hot weather, has made us feel like our lives are on hold — we won’t go through rites of passage every adult goes through.

It’s hard to comprehend, and anxiety about the present and future is having a real impact on mental health.

But we can get through this. And the thing that has helped me the most is poetry.

In my quarantine poetry I have tried to observe details about our new lives, such as the challenges of interacting with two-dimensional people on Zoom, as well as capturing feelings such as hope, frustration, and confusion about new “lockdown language”.

It has also felt important to try to pick out moments of beauty, such as the quietness and our appreciation of nature. But best of all, with Kate posting everyone’s amazing poems on Twitter, is that so many others have read them and felt touched by our words; poetry continues to help the world.

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