Only connect… “Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,Words entering almost the sense of touch” - Seamus Heaney Those of us working in ESOL may have reflected ruefully on the Gradgrindian utilitarianism of the “Skills for Life” materials we are often required to work with and sort to leaven them with a pinch of Poetry. Over recent years Smart, Lens and Augustine have written persuasively on the virtues of exploiting verse in the English Language classroom; building on the earlier work of Mayle and Duff in their still inspirational volume The Inward Ear. One of the main reasons for exploiting poetry cited in the introduction to this volume is its capacity to engage the learner not only on an intellectual level, but also an emotional one: any such connection with the text being likely to render it much more motivating as a tool for language learning. This seems to me unarguable. However, can we always assume that our learners will respond to poems in the way suggested here? In a recent discussion with my group on Reading Eun-Jung told me, “I have tried English Poetry, but I just don’t feel it.” What she lacked was the almost physical quality words seem to possess for native speakers written of by Heaney. Should we then discard Poetry as a source of texts to present to our learners? I would argue that there are a number of simple tools that we can use to help our students to connect with a poem on an emotional level: Use your voice: reading the poem out loud to your students will invest it with a clarity and emotional power it may lack for them on the page. If you do not have the confidence to “perform” the text yourself, excellent examples of poets and actors reading works can be downloaded from the internet. Realia: here perhaps is the key to the kind of tactile link written of by Heaney. Place an object in your learners’ hands as part of the activation stage of the lesson, and get them to explore it. This technique works especially well with poems containing food imagery, where the senses of smell and taste can also be engaged in an almost Proustian manner

[1]. With ESOL Citizenship issues in mind; an interesting lesson can be built around the themes of war, patriotism and sacrifice by examining a work by Owen, Rosenberg, or Sassoon after looking at some family mementoes of World War One. Pictures: as Mayle and Duff pointed out, one of the best ways of drawing your students into a poem is to explore the relationship between it an image. This might mean exploiting a photograph, or a reproduction of a great work of art[2] as a means of opening the text up to your students. Clearly, the internet renders the search for such images much less irksome, and if you have a Smart-board at your disposal they can be displayed in an even more effective way, perhaps with music playing in the background for additional impact. Each of the methods listed above will appeal to students with different learning styles and may be combined effectively to increase the impact of poetry in the classroom.

[1] I have, for example, used it with Learner’s almost impossibly poignant poem Raspberries, and his much lighter verse Chocolates: the fruit and sweets having the additional virtue of considerably improving the mood of fatigued students.

[2] Anne Stevenson, with her poems about the paintings of Bacon and Brueghel, springs to mind as a poet who has been directly influenced by paintings.