This is part of a poem or narrative that I’ve written for some Year 11 dance students at a school in Cambridge. They’re going to devise a dance about Oscar and Rachel, who are my father’s uncle and aunt. While you’re reading this, you might want to imagine two people, one Oscar, one Rachel. They are about 40 years old and they got married only a short while before this story begins.

I’ve done a book called Pebbles (Smokestack Books). It’s made up of what we can call ‘thoughts’ rather than ‘poems’.

If you change the shape of how you write, it can change the way you think and it can change the effect that the poem has on the way you read it and the way that other people read it. One way to do this, is to try writing something with one word per line.

You could say that this is a poem about being in water. That’s what it looks like. But what if we said that it’s not a poem about being in water. What would you say it’s about then? Whatever you think of that’s different from being in water, but still fits the words, will be OK. It also means that you’re saying that the words of the poem ‘stand in’ for other words...

The idea behind this poem is that a pet has thoughts about the person looking after it. Our cat loves sitting on our laps. So I thought about how the cat might think of what it feels like when I get up...

Each year Holocaust Memorial Day has a theme. This year it’s ‘Stand together’. I work closely with schools in Cambridge doing poetry, song, drama and documentary, doing a variety of story-telling, poetry performance, getting the children writing and performing too...

For the writing blog this month, I’ve collected together a set of tweets that I put up on twitter for a teacher who asked for help in doing poetry with Year 1. Here are my replies...

Before you read this poem to the children, talk with them about how wherever we are there are sounds. Get them in pairs talking about some sounds they have heard in different places. Remind them to think about holiday places as well as neighbourhood places, indoors and outdoors...

This is a poem about going out and looking. Some of it is really, really what I saw and one or two bits are things that I’ve invented. That’s OK! I was trying to create a scene...

On Sunday January 27 it’s Holocaust Memorial Day. I will be in Cambridge at a ceremony to commemorate those who died in the Holocaust but also to remember those in more recent genocides...