Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal December 2003 Volume 1 (6)

Scottish Poetry Library

Shelves full of inspiration

A priority for the Scottish Poetry Library is taking poetry into the classroom. Iain Young reports on how the library is developing unique resources including publishing the first work of our (potential) future Scottish poets; and Ken Cockburn describes the activities that bring them to poetry in the first place...

“For an enquirer with only a vague recollection of a poem, a search in INSPIRE by subject may direct them toward the required poem.”

Scottish Poetry Library holdings include much that could be made use of by teachers for pupils at all levels. Our children’s section includes colourful picture-books in verse for pre-school, and anthologies on a range of subjects and individual collections by the biggest names in children’s writing for primary pupils. We cater for secondary pupils also and have a dedicated section for teenage verse. In the last year one teacher at a local secondary school set his pupils the summer assignment of borrowing and reading a collection by a modern Scottish poet from the SPL. These links are ones we are keen to develop.

We hold items for use by teachers in preparing lesson plans, some of which are tied in to the current curriculum. In addition to our own Teachers’ Resource packs, our collection includes titles by the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, an American venture of relevance to teachers elsewhere, and the vibrant new series of titles from Itchy Coo, who are actively promoting use of Scots in classrooms. The majority of our titles can be borrowed, including audiobooks. We can issue lending cards to individuals or classes and have loaned items to interested pupils following workshops in the library. Access is not limited to schools in Edinburgh as the SPL operates a postal loan service which means that we can supply items to users throughout the UK.

External access to SPL holdings is facilitated through our online library catalogue INSPIRE. INSPIRE has been specifically designed for the SPL’s collection of Scottish and international verse titles, criticism and background material. Holdings include cuttings, audio and video recordings, periodicals, and individual poem titles. One unique feature is INSPIRE’s subject thesaurus.

INSPIRE allows for the very full indexing of items by subject, language, place of origin and period as well as personal, given and corporate names. Our subject indexing system has been developed specifically for the SPL and we can assign subjects to catalogue records down to the level of an individual poem in a collection. The potential of our database for researchers is constantly expanding: the subject authority file currently lists many thousands of terms, reflecting the almost unlimited subject matter of poetic inspiration, from artistic, social or intellectual themes to environmental or scientific ones. For an enquirer with only a vague recollection of a poem, a search in INSPIRE by subject may direct them toward the required poem. Lists of poems on a selected subject can be easily produced, which may be useful for teachers in identifying poems on subjects relevant for class projects.

Canned searches now allow library users to complete complex and defined searches without any awareness of the processes involved. Users can currently bring up lists of Scottish poetry titles published in any given year. Additional canned searches are available on the website to display holdings for featured poets, such as those in our expanding Poets A-Z, which provides biographical information on selected modern Scottish poets. It is envisaged that in the future canned searches could be created to relate to the themes of events taking place at the library.

For more advanced studies INSPIRE encompasses the data of our ongoing index to selected Scottish poetry periodicals, the Scottish Poetry Index (http://www.spl.org.uk/search_spl/poetry-index.html). The SPI gives detailed access by author, title and subject, to all poetry and poetry-related material in 20 selected Scottish magazines from 1952. A wealth of poetry, published only in the journals and including much of our leading poets’ early work, is easily traceable through the SPI. It covers critical material, reviews, selected letters, and all individual poems, analysed by subject, theme, language and literary form. The nature of this indexing means that INSPIRE provides access to information on poems unavailable in published collections. As such, it is invaluable for academic research, and represents a unique resource.

The most common enquiries received by the SPL are from users wishing to locate individual poems. These are often poems remembered from childhood, learned at school for recitation perhaps, with long forgotten titles and only vague recollections of the poet’s name. We have a dedicated section on our website for just such enquiries, Lost for Words.

Our Young Persons website contains interactive poetry templates and games to assist inspiration and is used to display poems written by pupils during workshops in the library. We have also recently published a collection of poems by children and may be the first to publish works by the future crop of Scottish poetic talent.

Iain Young

“Our priority for future development is working with teachers so that they can use creative writing in their own classroom as and when they wish to.”

In the late 1980s, the SPL was based in small premises in Tweeddale Court. There was room to welcome only small groups of visitors into the Library. This fact, coupled with the staff’s desire to make the resources physically available in parts of Scotland beyond Edinburgh, led to the first SPL tours. The Post Office donated a van, and visits were organised to schools, colleges, libraries, prisons and writers groups the length and breadth of Scotland.

Until 1993 the visits were made by the SPL Director, Tessa, Ransford. Stewart Reid was appointed Fieldworker in 1993, and in 1996 I took over that role from him. Since then the SPL has acquired a new and larger van, which as well as the poetry it carries inside also features this specially written poem by Edwin Morgan on the outside:

The poets lie right tight in the van
(I’ll read that again)
The poets try to alight from the van
(I’ll read that again)
The poets are always right in the van
Of whatever invigorates mortal man.

I continue to visit organisations and venues across Scotland, offering borrowing sessions, talks and poetry writing workshops, but most of the visits involve running workshops in schools. When visiting primary schools, I try to run sessions which tie in with the current class project, or another area of interest for the pupils. In this way they tend to be knowledgeable about their subject and to have something to write about. Recently I’ve run sessions on such topics as the Spanish Armada, Ancient Egypt and the Second World War. In secondary schools the focus tends to be broader, involving more reading and thinking about a range of poems, as well as writing in a variety of forms.

One short form is the haiku, originally from Japan but now widely used in the West. This can be appeciated and written by pupils of various ages and abilities. Good haiku usually involve some sort of contrast, express or implied. This haiku was written by pupils in a West Lothian school during a workshop for the Japan Festival 2001, and features contrasts of scale, materials and colour:

in the cornfield
blue combine chops stems
mice collect seeds

An even shorter form is the Football Haiku, devised by Alec Finlay as a way of marking the 2002 World Cup finals in Japan and South Korea. It comprises three lines of just one word each, and is connected to haiku, the newspaper headline, and the t-shirt slogan. It allows pupils to use creatively knowledge and vocabulary they already possess. In Aberdeenshire to ‘mince’ the ball means to kick it hard, as in the following example:

CHIP
MINCE
BATTER

Since moving to a new building in 1999, the Library has been able to offer workshops for school groups on the premises. For these we work with a range of poets and other artists. For practical reasons workshops are attended mostly by schools in Edinburgh. Sometimes sessions are entirely based in the Library; sometimes the groups are taken for a walk nearby, for example into Holyrood Park, or around the Canongate Kirkyard, and asked to make notes on what they see to write up later; sometimes we work with other organisations such as Our Dynamic Earth or the National Museums of Scotland, to ensure that pupils are given varied stimuli to write from. Poems written in such sessions have been collected in the anthology Poet Makar Bard. It includes ‘Sundial’ written by a pupil at Gracemount High School:

The sunshine moves around the school
And warmly measures out the hours
Today will be tomorrow’s past
These seeds will be tomorrow’s flowers.

The success of these sessions has also led the Library to publish two Teachers’ Resource Packs, each featuring a variety of photocopiable lesson plans written by poets who have run workshops. Topics include ‘Tiger Imagery’ by Brian Whittingham, ‘My Family’ by Liz Niven, and ‘Riddles’ by Ron Butlin. (nb The pack for P4-6 classes is currently out of print. Copies of the pack for S1&2 are available from the Library.)

Sessions have also been run with trainee teachers, giving them ideas and, perhaps more importantly, the confidence to teach poetry in the classroom. Poetry seems to be an area which is not given much attention during their training, and – with honourable exceptions – teachers often have little knowledge either of contemporary poetry, or of how it can be used in the classroom. In primary schools especially, poetry can be linked to many areas of the curriculum – language most obviously, but also drama, music, history, science and so on. Poetry can both inform, and act as an outlet for pupils’ knowledge and ideas. Our priority for future development is working with teachers so that they can use creative writing in their own classroom as and when they wish to, rather than depending on external help.

A new project for us is Poetry & Architecture, an annual poetry competition for P3-S4 pupils, which the SPL is running with the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland. Due to run over five years, the theme for this year is Poet in the House. An information pack, available on request from the SPL, includes specially written poems by Jackie Kay, Robert Crawford, Diana Hendry and others, as well as a lesson plan to encourage pupils to write their own poem.

Iain Young is Librarian and Ken Cockburn Assistant Director at the Scottish Poetry Library.

Information

For further details about SPL publications, activities and resources, please contact:
Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton’s Close, Canongate, Edinburgh EH8 8DT.
T: 0131-557 2876
www.spl.org.uk
inquiries@spl.org.uk

Information Scotland Vol.1 (6) December 2003

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