British poet and performer Joseph Coelho has the most awkward slot at the Children’s Books Ireland conference. It’s day two, the Sunday start after a Saturday of events ending in sociable drinks that are often carried over to neighbouring pubs. The conference, held in Smithfield’s Lighthouse Cinema for the last number of years, has become a regular fixture for both kid-lit aficionados and the wine bars of Dublin 7.
Sunday morning: a tricky time. Coelho doesn’t particularly care. He doesn’t even particularly notice. As a poet who has held a variety of jobs and whose sense of poetry was that it was a thing that “it was something other people did”, he is now fearless in leading audiences – usually young people, but today adults – in a call-and-response activity as he performs a tongue-in-cheek poem about “having it made”.
He often visits schools and finds that poetry intimidates the children, so begins his sessions much in the same way he begins his talk to adults: with performance. It offers up something new: an adult in the room who is not the teacher, and a reminder – typically explicitly stated – that there is no such thing as right or wrong when it comes to poetry.
Coelho does not do right or wrong, or the standard what-does-it-mean response to poetry. His focus is on having something to say, rather than an exam-mandated process of decoding. Growing up in what he describes as “a house of worry” in Roehampton, just outside London, he felt that poetry was for other people. He was the son of a single parent, and even though there were books in the house, like The Cat In The Hat, and even though he had excellent teachers, “writing” seemed unattainable.
Like many writers from a working-class background, he nevertheless played with language constantly. His family had a great love of “playing with words”, particularly his grandmother, who he only recently discovered writes verse: “mostly in cards to people. featuring lots of innuendo”.
Same grandmother was shamed at school, as are many aspiring creatives, for not thinking in the "right way", and Coelho's poems often focus on the teachers – both good and bad – who influence us at an early stage. His first poem was written for a school competition and focused on the inhumane treatment of ursine creatures; he does now admit that the title Unbearable was a bit on the nose.
Nevertheless, it was the beginning of a sliver of possibility that he could be seen as “a writer” – a sense reinforced when he took a comic book workshop one Saturday, aged 12, and was for the first time “seen”. He kept writing throughout school, continually offering up “teen angst” poems hopefully to his sixth-form drama group – who mainly declined to perform them.
But Coelho had already discovered that “poetry and writing belonged to me too” and that “poetry is innate and belongs to everyone” – a call he continues to share with audiences to this day. Even as he worked a variety of jobs he wrote, and, with the help of poetry performance collectives, learned to teach – learned to share his love of poetry with students.
“We’ve often had terrible experiences being taught poetry,” he says, while noting that children often use poetic techniques without being prompted. Without labelling a session or exercise as “poetry”, children will instinctively call upon alliteration or onomatopoeia – and be surprised when they are told (or reminded) that this is poetry. Coelho is also conscious of the need to distinguish between “composition” and “transcription”, including innovative material-generating exercises into the programme before students sit down to actually “write” their poems.
Should this sound terribly selfless, Coelho hastens to add that making poetry accessible to others has made it more accessible to him. The process of explaining, and thinking about, poetry has sharpened his own poetic instinct. His latest book does not focus so much on poetry as it does libraries, a force he cites as “a constant backdrop in my childhood”.
Coelho's Luna Loves Library Day (Andersen Press, £11.99), with illustrations from Fiona Lumbers, has just been released, and focuses on the joy of libraries for young people, inspired by Coelho's own visits to libraries (he regularly delivers shows, which he describes as "an hour of poetic storytelling", to audiences around Britain).
For Coelho these shows “serve something bigger than just the artist”, and as a teenage employee of his local library he adored working there – while still having fun with his mates. Like Luna, Coelho was raised in a single-parent family and it was important for him to demonstrate that non-traditional families are both increasingly the norm but also very common sites of happiness and security for children, rather than the doom and gloom often depicted.
By the time he leaves his audience, everyone has forgotten that it is early on a Sunday. And it is no surprise that, at the conference bookstall, his books sell out instantly, and that an afternoon re-order is required. It’s a tricky order, to engage a bunch of tired-out, overworked booksellers, librarians, teachers, writers, editors and publishers and everyone else on what is more often than not their second day “off” from “work”.
But when you do it? Rest assured. You've earned it.
Claire Hennessy is a writer, editor and creative-writing facilitator
