Teaching poetry: Writing poetry — teaching as a writer

This paper considers the ways in which the authentic strategies and struggles of the creative writer in formulating a text, can be translated into classroom activity. It explores four activities which derived from my own practice as a writer, and demonstrates the process of adapting, trialling and evaluating them in a range of different classroom settings. The paper attempts to answer the questions: w ere these ‘real-life’ processes successful as a basis for learning activities? How did the learners respond and what can we learn from heir responses? The paper concludes with the premise that being congruent with one’s own ‘real-life’ strategies can indeed lead to valid learning activities, and that these activities help us to deconstruct many of the myths about what it means to be creative.