News

Recently, the Sixth Form took a trip to an A Level 'Poems of the Decade' conference in which many poets, such as Daljit Nagra, Patience Agbabi and Julias Copus, spoke to us and many other Sixth Form pupils about their poems, providing insights and relevant contextual elements of their poems that helped us shape our understanding and broaden our perspectives. Their poems, additions of ‘Poems of the Decade’, an anthology of poems we study at A Level, were firstly picked apart by their respective poets, offering their intentions that may have differed from our initial understanding. A question and answer session followed, in which we were given an opportunity to ask if other interpretations aligned with the poets’ methods, or to gain further insight into a specific part of the poem where perhaps gaps had been left in class. ‘Eat Me’, written by Patience Agbabi, a fundamentally feminist poem, was particularly relevant to the Lower Sixth, as we had refrained from reading the poem before the conference to have a fresh and unbiased view and use Agbabi’s true intentions to help us shape our understanding in a more relevant way. Agbabi also gave us insight into her inspiration for the poem (a documentary she had watched on feeders). The conference ended with Sarah Crown comparing a poem, unseen to her, with a poem from our anthology, much like the A Level exam we take. Crown gave us a helpful portrait of how to emulate ideas and where to take them within our writing, as well as providing some interesting ideas to the poem we have already studied, ‘On Her Blindness’. The conference was of much help to the Sixth Form as, despite having to refrain from implementing context into our poetry essays, it still provided us with perceptive ideas that perhaps we had not thought of before, as well as broadening our perspectives: something always important in literature.

M Masterson, L6T