Automata Lab

Maria and Georg Kroshniewitz lived in a small flat

in North London with their three children. Ever since

she was a small girl, Maria had made small moving

toys. Using parts of old construction kit games, she

would make windmills and cranes and trucks. When

she first met Georg, she kept this skill secret, not

wanting him to know that she had this deep interest,

deep longing to make moving objects. He was

visiting her one time and while they were talking of

an old movie they had both seen, a sound

came from the cupboard behind them, a whirring

noise that stopped, started, and stopped again. It

sounded like a kettle beginning to boil. Curious,

Georg asked Maria and though she tried to laugh

it off, Georg persisted and in the end opened the

cupboard and showed him dozens of automata.

He could hardly believe that Maria had made them

herself but it wasn’t long before she showed him

just how she could and told him how she had spent

years at it. He was intrigued and then bit by bit

became obsessed with it himself. They became

a couple and had three children and all the while

they made their little automata, moving now on to

little robots and more lifelike forms that walked

and danced. And all the time it was something

private and domestic and their children grew up

amazed and delighted by them but ultimately

taking them for granted. It was what they all did,

invent, make and play with automata. One time

the middle child took one to school for an open

day and it so happened that one of the parents

who came, worked in television and it wasn’t

long before Maria and Georg and the children

were showing their models and robots on a

TV show. In the modern way, one short sequence

from the show - where the robot danced beautifully

to a joyful samba song and then appeared to

slap the show’s host, went viral. Maria and Georg

were in demand all over the world. I say, ‘Maria

and Georg’ because the children didn’t want

to be part of it. No amount of pressure from

TV moguls, hosts of shows, and PR people would

convince them that they should take part in the

demonstrations and spectacles that were devised

by the TV companies. But, Maria and Georg pressed

on, using their old automata, making new ones,

devising new shows while the children, growing up

now into older teenagers, kept their distance. They

were supervised mostly by various au pairs, live-in

nannies, and cooks enabling Maria and Georg to tour

the world. The children had their own ambitions:

one wanted to be an archaeologist, one a jazz

guitarist and one an accountant. With their new-

found wealth, Maria and Georg created an

automata lab and started to push the technology

to its limits. Some of it was top secret as it

involved workmanship at a micro level. The point

of it all was the marriage between the old and

the new. And this was the charm. It was all a

fantastic success, until disaster struck and the

automata lab was burnt to the ground. At first it

was assumed that it was an accident. It had

a terrible effect on both Maria and Georg who

found that mentally and physically they couldn’t

pick it up and start again. They began to argue

and fight and bit by bit they each started to

suspect that the other had been responsible for

the fire. They each started to find motives as to

why they might each have started it, Maria

accusing Georg of envy, Georg accusing Maria

of greed and resentment - both claiming that this

went back to the beginning of their relationship.

In the end, they couldn’t bear each other’s

company any more and split. There was hardly

any wealth left, because the automata lab

company was over-capitalised and some kind

of dodgy financing structure landed them in

debt. At the same time, the child who wanted

to be an archaeologist showed symptoms of

a fatal illness. The separated parents were

desperately obsessed with the whys and

wherefores of their own destruction to be

terribly concerned with their dying child. She

eventually died at the age of 22 and following

her death, the jazz guitarist child came to

Georg and told him that the archaeologist

had confessed that she had caused the

automata lab to burn down. How was that

possible, said Georg? And the guitarist

reminded him of one of the automata that

the archaeologist had made in the time when

they were still doing shows together: a wonderful,

spluttering, jerking, stumbling, flying dragon that

breathed fire when controlled from a mobile

phone. She had waited her moment, and, in

effect phoned the dragon, and the result was the

conflagration. Georg asked the guitarist if he

knew whether Maria knew. ‘Of course, she

does,’ he said, ‘she always knew,’ he said.

Last Days

In his last days, Tony the cat became

more discerning and decided that

outside was not worth bothering about

and his litter tray was not up to scratch.

He found more amenable sites where

he could remind us that he was

still alive: the fire place, under the pipes,

behind the stove. It may have been his

version of the treasure hunt where

the only clue is the smell. And perhaps

he knew that we have lost some of

our powers of tracking scents and that

we would end up in the wrong corner of

a room, puzzled. But then, after a whole

morning looking, we’d find it, hurrahs all

round, a brief discussion over who had

stewardship of the treasure itself and

then the wait for the next hunt. Small

wonder he’s much missed.

National Poetry Day? Week? Month? Year?

[Feel free to print this page off and use in school for a staff discussion or a training day.]


The simplest thing to do for National Poetry Day (or any day, week, month or year!)  is to read poems. If you're a teacher reading this, can I suggest that you think up as many different ways of 'serving up' poems as you can. For example:

1. Handing out poems and poetry books to a group or a class of children and saying to pairs of children/school students, 'Choose a poem, work out how to perform it, and we'll all come back in ten minutes time, for a Poetry Show.' You might suggest to them that they can perform it in any way they like: saying it together, taking alternate lines, miming some or all of it, getting the rest of the 'audience' to join in with parts of it, making a rhythm to go with it by doing 'beat box' or tapping your chest or using a 'shaker' etc etc. After the show, invite the children/school students to pick out things that they've seen which they liked and would like to have a go at doing themselves, next time you have a poetry show. The more you do this, the more the children/students will want to read ad write poetry and the more they will know how to do it. That's because poetry has its own built-in 'hooks' - its ways of attracting people to want to hear it, read it, and have a go at writing it. These 'hooks' are what poets spend their lives devising. All you have to do is believe in the poem, believe in the poet, believe in the children, and students reading it. Poetry shows will do the work of introducing children and students to poems a thousand times better than any worksheet. 

2. Put up big posters of poems around the school and in classrooms. Simply write out a poem on as large a piece of paper as you can find and pin it up. 

3. Think of poems as if they are music videos. This means that you can have solos, duets, choruses, backing groups. You can make power points, and videos of poems. 

4. The simplest way to get into writing poems (not the only way!) is to a) read a poem b) talk about it together c) say to people: 'we could write a poem like that'. 'Write a poem like that...' can mean write a poem that sounds like that, or has a shape like that, or uses bits of the poem, or is 'sparked off by something in the poem', uses the pictures in the poem in some way...and so on. 

5. When I say, 'talk about it together you can try some or all of this:
a) talk about anything in the poem that you thought 'affected' you. How? 
b) talk about things in the poem that made you think of something that has happened to you or to someone you know. How? 
c) talk about things in the poem that you made you think of something that you've read, or seen on TV, a film, a song you know, or any other 'text' you know. How? Why? 
d) if you could ask someone in the poem a question, or if you could ask the write of the poem a question, what would it be?
e) collect up the questions and let everyone choose a question from that list to try to answer. Perhaps invite someone to be the person in the poem or the poet in order to put some answers together. Use the internet to find out some of the answers. Make it an investigation. 
f) Invite groups to be 'poem detectives' in order to find the poem's 'secret strings' - these are the unwritten links between parts of the poem. If you have a copy of the poem, you can invite the children/ students to draw these links on to the poem. Invite the children/students to explain how or why these are links. These can be:
i) links of sound like rhyme or rhythm or alliteration or assonance
ii) links of shape like verses, and stanzas
iii) links of images being repeated - similar words to describe something...the 'lexical field'.
iv) links between images being contrasted or as opposites or rivals. 
v) any other link. If the children/students can show or explain that it's a link, it's a link!

6. Resource the class or school with poems and poetry books. Use poetry videos from YouTube. Use the National Poetry Archive for recordings of poems. 

7. Encourage the children/students to think of themselves as 'collectors' of poems, or parts of poems. They can do this in an anthology that you make together as a whole class; or make private anthologies of poems you like; or have a space on the wall where you share favourite poems or parts of poems, lines, phrases, words from poems or anything else that 'sounds poetic' - proverbs, sayings and the like. 

8. Think up ways of 'interpreting' poems other than the usual 'comprehension' sort of ways: music, dance, film, art, painting, model making, making a box to represent what's in a poem and so on - all 'inspired' by a poem. 

Flies

The flies had died. The ground was pretending
to be frosted over but not making that good a
job of it. We made little clouds as we walked.
The flies had died. We said it was autumn. A
reasonable suggestion. But a decision was made
and summer came back. There was heat on my 
back when I sat at the table. And by midday the
flies rose from the dead. Buzzing at the window,
hopeful that something nearby would be rotting.
Perhaps it was. 

Pigeon

You pigeon, so grand, in your well-fed

suit walking our bit of grass like it’s

the lawn at Downton Abbey, the one

you hire locals to mow. Little would

we know, you were the one who

drove straight at the bedroom window

smashed it and brought terror to

two seven year olds. It was you,

then, who couldn’t get out, and

you couldn’t make up whether to

walk or fly, every time you opened

your wings you hit the wall. And you

shat on the table. Not so grand. Then.

I opened the window and flapped

a towel behind you and you were away,

beating the air like nothing had happened.

Gone, without a thank you.

Jays

Jay rage

in the alley

at the back of the house.

Swearing at each other.

Such flash clothes.

Such anger.

Then they fly off,

in furious straight lines.

Meryl Streep at the Dentist

At the dentists today he sang Randy Newman’s

‘Short People’, he did the German tonguetwister:

‘Brautkleid bleibt Brautkleid und

Blaukraut bleibt Blaukraut’

told me that he was friends with Meryl Streep’s

double - who was Maltese and who was in

some kind of trick that the Daily Mail

played on the Sunday Times where

the Sunday Times thought they were

interviewing Meryl Streep but they weren’t

and just the other day he met Cat Stevens’s

brother in a cafe who was with the bloke

who played Romeo in the Zeffirelli film.

I said that I had had a dream about Meryl

Streep when I said to her that she was really

good in that film where she was in a raft going

over the rapids with Sam Neill and she said

thanks. He told me not to chew on the crown

for 24 hours because the glue is in the second

phase.