A few quick tips for poetry performance

 Performance poetry tip for schools: think of your body being in a box. For some lines, the box is tall and thin, sometimes it's small and square, sometimes the box is huge. Your hands and legs (gestures and movements) reach the edges depending on what's right for the line or word

You can express the rhythm of a poem in any part of your body or in all of it. It could be just your eyebrows, or fingers or how you sway your whole body. Try to make the rhythm of the words help the rhythm of your body, as if the words can push or pull.

Remember that your voice is a musical instrument: it can go up and down, loud and soft, spikey (staccato), smooth and slide. It can make rhythms rather than tunes. In groups we can combine these, some doing rhythm, some bass, some melody. You can take a phrase from a poem (eg the chorus) and by repeating it quietly you have a rhythm and bass over which you can say a poem.

As one example (sorry it's me!): when I do 'Bear Hunt' (see YouTube) notice I do big, I do small, I do mouth-rhythms, I use my arms and body for rhythm, I do faces, I go fast, I go slow. One or some or any of these you can use for any part of the poems you perform.

Hal Syndrome - performative non-remembering

In the plays, Henry IV parts i and ii, Prince Hal hangs out with some low lifes, the most memorable of whom is Falstaff. This is in its own way, scandalous. Hal's father (Henry IV) is not happy about it. Then Henry IV dies, so Hal becomes king - Henry V. Falstaff thinks that the old relationship will continue but when he presents himself to Hal, Hal says, 'I know thee not old man.'

It's a fascinating moment of what we might call today 'performative non-remembering'. That's to say, for the knockabout, boozy Hal to transform himself into the calculating monarch, he has to show ('performative') that he doesn't 'know' Falstaff and that way of life. It's a form of censorship through staged silence.

So in amongst all the other syndromes, principles, effects, traits, tropes, 'razors' that people talk of these days I'm going to suggest Hal Syndrome. This is any event, story, occasion that grabs the news, preoccupies people, is apparently important but then when the situation changes, it's no longer news, it's not important. In other words there is 'performative non-remembering'.

I'm sure you can all think of examples from politics, culture, your own personal lives. It's happened to me in the last couple of weeks (that's to say the performative non-remembering), and so I needed a name for it.

I give you Hal Syndrome.

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My books for children that reflect Jewish history, Jewish folklore or my Jewish background

The Golem of Old Prague (first published by Andre Deutsch) then published by Five Leaves Books) illustrated first by Val Biro, then by Baruch ben Yitshak

The Missing, the true story of my family in World War Two (Walker books) 

On the Move, poems of migration, illustrated by Quentin Blake (Walker Books) 

Please Write Soon. an unforgettable story of what happened to two cousins in World War 2, illustrated by Michael Foreman (Scholastic) 

Barking for Bagels, illustrated by Tony Ross (Andersen Press)

The Disappearance of Emile Zola: Love, Literature and the Dreyfus Case (Faber)

One Day, a true story of survival in the Holocaust illustrated by Benjamin Phillips (Walker Books)

Books for children that include poems that talk about my Jewish background:

Out of this World, illusrated by Ed Vere (HarperCollins) to be published August 2024

Quick Let's Get Out of Here (illustrated by Quentin Blake) (Puffin) 

You Wait Till I'm Older Than You (Puffin) 

Jelly Boots, Smelly Boots, illustrated by David Tazzyman, (Bloomsbury) 

Michael Rosen's Big Book of Bad Things (Puffin) 

Video of my telling the story of what happened to my relatives in World War 2, based on the books 'The Missing' and 'On the Move'. 

Just copy and paste the link below into your browser: 

Teachers, why not use the video with the books? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iR_GiyIJ6k&t=19s

The True Story of the making of the book of 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt' - please note the legal implications.

Folkore and children's books

I've done this before but as some people on social media seem bothered about the matter, I'll explain it again. But first, a word or two about folklore and children's books. For at least two hundred years, collectors, writers and editors have put 'traditional', 'anonymous' or 'folk' stories, rhymes and songs into books directed at children. The most famous of these is the one we know as 'Grimms' Fairy Tales' or some such. The Brothers Grimm collected stories and adapted them. Another famous collector, adapter and editor was Andrew Lang. If you go to google images and put in, say, Andrew Lang and 'Blue Fairy Book' you can see that on the cover it says simply 'Andrew Lang' but on the title page it says 'Edited by Andrew Lang'.

'Retold by...'

Some people seem bothered that this format was copied for 'Bear Hunt'. That's to say,  on the cover it says 'Michael Rosen' and 'Helen Oxenbury' but inside of the hardcover first edition (and all subsequent hardcover editions) and in the full format paperback version, it says 'Retold by Michael Rosen'.  The board book version which doesn't have the usual endpapers does not have 'retold by Michael Rosen'. Though I didn't have a conversation about this at the time,  the publishers used the Andrew Lang format for the hardback and full-format paperback versions.

Objections and history of 'Bear Hunt'

Some people (in particular someone using the pseudonym on X (formerly Twitter) of 'Gurujuish' ) feels that they have discovered some previously unknown link to a source for 'Bear Hunt' ie a 1983 version in the Smithsonian collection in the US performed beautifully by Linda Goss with children participating. Her version is with obstacles of a tree, a river, a cornfield, a 'lah dee dee da dee' and a cave. The obstacles in my and Helen's book are grass, river, mud, snowstorm, forest and cave. The obstacles are not described in Linda Goss's version (they are in mine) and mostly the moves through the obstacles are done with noises not words. The repeated line is 'can't go over it, can't go around it,' till it gets to the cornfield which they go 'through'. In my version it is 'We can't go over it, we can't go under it, we've got to go through it'.  At the cave, the singer takes you to 'feel something' and after they realise it's a bear, they run home (no words, just noises made by slapping legs), and the last line is 'we were lucky that time'.  Great version. Very different from the ones that I got to know, as I'll explain in a moment and different from mine 

Just to be clear, I didn't ever hear Linda Goss's version when I was giving my version to the publisher some time in around 1986 or 87. The first time I heard Linda Goss's version was in 2024. The book that Helen Oxenbury and I made for Walker Books, came out in 1989. 

What version or versions had I heard? 

The main one was one sung by the Scots folksinger Alison McMorland who produced an album 'Funny Family' in 1977 (five years before Linda Goss's version) and who I booked to sing 'Bear Hunt' on a show I wrote for Channel Four in the early 80s ('Everybody Here'). It's very different from Linda Goss's version. I had also heard versions sung by the Brownies (Girl Guide movement) earlier but their version was a 'Lion Hunt'. *** [see below for an update on that.] Alison explained to me that her version was an American version and had been devised in US  summer camps. Some of these included a repeated line about guns which as you will know, I didn't use. Here's how someone on the forum '4Real' remembers that version: 'I first learned this story as a song in Music class and then at camp. We used to sing, 'I'm going on a bear hunt. I'm not scared. Got my gun by my side.' 

Early book versions of 'Bear Hunt'

Other print versions much earlier than Linda Goss's version (which have emerged since I first wrote this blog) are: 'I'm Going on a Bear Hunt' by Sandra Stroner Sivulich, illus by Glen Rounds, published by Dutton in 1973, in which the obstacles are trees, rivers and caves;  'Bear Hunt' by Kathleen Savage and Margaret Stewart, illus. by Leonard Shortall, published by Prentice Hall in 1977, in which the obstacles are a river, bridge, cliff and a swamp. (Thanks to Jo Brodie on Twitter/X for providing these.) Note again, our version does not have trees, a bridge, a cliff or a swamp. 

Any claim that I stole/ripped off/copied Linda Goss is simply untrue. 

Whose idea to make it into a book?

It wasn't my idea to make a book out of the rhyme/song. It was one that I was performing as part of my poetry show from the early 1980s onwards, largely thanks to Alison. The editor of Walker Books saw me perform it and said it would make a great picture book. We discussed who could or should write it down. He insisted that I should. So I set about doing that. 

How to turn a performed song or chant into a book?

The first immediate problem I had to overcome in my writing of a text that would work for a book was that at each of the 'venues', the children meet an obstacle, in my act, I produced noises, not onomatopoeic words. So I came up with onomatopoeic words, such as 'squelch squerch' and for the new obstacles that I invented with: 'hoooo wooo' and 'stumble trip'. Then, again, in my oral version, I didn't have clear descriptions of each of the venues. In our book version, I wrote descriptions: 'thick oozy mud' or 'narrow gloomy cave'. And finally, my oral version wasn't long enough for the fixed length of picture books. That's why I extended it.

So put these together and I came up with a) onomatopoeic words for the passage through the obstacles, b) I came up with words to describe each obstacle and c) I added two more obstacles (the snowstorm and the forest) . I think I also made some changes that I don't remember now, to the final rush home. 

I had nothing to do with devising or planning the final picture of the bear walking along the beach. Indeed, I had nothing to do with how the rhyme/song is pictured. Helen Oxenbury did that entirely herself and, as I've always said, what an incredible, beautiful and wonderful job she did. 

Retellings 

So, 'retold' is indeed an accurate description of what I did though you could also say it was 'edited' or 'adapted' or 'extended' or 'expanded' by me. It's a job I have done many times with 'traditional' and 'folkloric' material, as with retellings of the German 'Til Eulenspiegel' stories, a Russian story I called 'Clever Cakes', a song called 'Little Rabbit Foo Foo',  an Indian story about a Rajah's ears, the Jewish Golem of Prague stories, a set of stories called 'How the Animals got Their Colours', an edition of Aesop's Fables and recently, a re-telling of 'Jack and the Beanstalk' (Tradewind Books). 

I have also done a book of jokes 'The Laugh Out Loud Joke Book' which is made up largely of  jokes I've collected, a song book of mostly traditional comic songs called 'Sonsense Nongs' and so on. This is part of the work that writers for children do and you can find wonderful work in this field from Michael Morpurgo, Geraldine McCaughrean and many others. 

Copyright and adaptations

In legal terms, what we do is create a new copyright version. You can find the same legality operating right the way across the world of folklore whether that be songs, stories, rhymes, jokes or whatever. 'Bear Hunt' belongs in this wider tradition of books in general where folkloric material has been adapted, retold, edited and so on. 

I am very sorry that some people might feel that somehow 'Bear Hunt' is less of a book because I adapted something rather than thought the whole thing up myself.  I always thought that the 'retold by' tag would make the situation clear. I would never want to take more credit for something that I've done than is my right or due. I'll take the credit for the adaptation, invention and editing work I did but not the concept in its totality. 

Another analogy for this, if you like, is when people adapt stories and novels for the stage or film.  There has never been an attempt by me to hoodwink people about what I did for the book, In fact, I've told this story about the making of the book many times in the press and in media interviews.

Who is identified with the book?

Then there's the question of who is identified with the book. In my mind, the book was 'made' by Helen and the editors at Walker Books. What I did was provide them with a text that would 'work' for what they then created. However, I have performed the text of the book on YouTube and on the publisher's website where it's been viewed just short of 30 million of times (2 vids on my son Joe's and my YouTube Channel, one on the Walker Book site). In addition, since it came out in 1989, I've performed it in schools and libraries, at book festivals and the like,  hundreds, if not thousands of times. Then when Channel Four commissioned an animation of the book, I worked with the animators (Lupus Films) on their version. I'm even on the sound track making the noise of the bear! It follows from this involvement that I've become part of how the book is seen or known. Again, I don't want to make this into something more than it is. It is simply me performing my version of this story but doing it in many places including in several versions online and helping with the film version. 

Untrue claims, allegations and accusations

However, some people for their own reasons which I don't want to go into just now, want to describe what I did was take 'the pre-existing rhyme' and imply that I simply or only put a rhyme as I found it, into a book. That is not what I did, any more than the Brothers Grimm simply or only put 'Hansel and Gretel', 'as they found it', into a book. They adapted it, revised it, edited it, expanded it. 

It is neither accurate nor legally correct to say that I 'put the pre-existing rhyme in a book', as Mr Simon Myerson KC put it in a tweet (07.03.2024), nor indeed if Mr Myerson or anyone else suggests, as Mr Myerson did in a tweet on 29.08.2025,  that I had 'taken pre-existing songs and put them into a book'.  (This last phrase is ambiguous as it could possibly refer to any of my books where I edited, used or adapted songs.)  

If anyone says that I took a pre-existing poem, chant or song and simply put it as I found it (or them) into the book of 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt', and they are saying this,  in order to somehow damage my reputation, then they should be advised that stating this is not a true statement of fact. I repeat, I did exactly what it says on the title page: I 'retold' the rhyme/song/story in the tradition of the Grimms, Andrew Lang and many others. I did not put a 'pre-existing rhyme' or 'pre-existing songs' 'in a book'. I adapted the versions I knew, by writing new bits, and cutting bits that I didn't like. 

Specific legal matter

I didn't want to add a specific matter to this blog but on account of some social media activity, I feel that I have to. I say above that people have raised objections to my version of Bear Hunt 'for certain reasons'. Very vague, on my part. For legal reasons and other reasons, I didn't say what these 'reasons' are. Let me say this then:  the line of attack that I didn't write Bear Hunt has been a supposed defence of a person I once criticised for having tweeted a manipulated form of both the book and some lines from Bear Hunt. To be clear: that person himself stated clearly either or both in a libel claim and in a university hearing that a) I wrote 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt' and b) that the lines that he wrote were a 'parody' or a 'pastiche' or a 'corruption' of my lines from the book and that he 'echoed' a use (re-use in effect) I had once made of my own lines. The 'person' objected to the political use I had once made of my own lines and so was parodying and echoing my political use. It's clear then, I was one of the targets of the tweet. 

In other words, if people think they are defending this person's views, by saying that I did not write Bear Hunt or that I 'stole' it from someone,  they are mistaken. If people want to see screenshots of the quotes (ie 'parody', 'pastiche', 'corruption', 'echoed'), please write to me and I can provide them. 

Further information about the history of 'Bear Hunt'

***Following the publication of this blog, I received a note on Facebook today (April 8 2024) from someone (Margaret E. Sandercock) saying this: 

'I was a brownie and girl guide about 70 years ago - in those days, we sat in a circle and did the actions to ‘I’m going on a lion hunt’. I definitely remember how we all screamed ‘a lion’ when we found ‘something soft, something furry’ in the cave and how we scrabbled our way back home, panting as we arrived! ' 

This puts one origin for the song/rhyme as early as 1954, long before Alison McMorland's and Linda Goss's versions, both of which, are great versions too. 

Here's a further refinement to the story:

Richard De St Croix

@s0apy

·

3m

Replying to

@MichaelRosenYes

The version I learnt working in an NCH family centre in Stockwell in 1981 was: (4/4 time) I'm hunting bears.. I'm not scared.. Got my gun in my pocket! Bullets, three! I walk through the short grass (etc). Did it for some friends kids in 2020 and they were totally aghast! :))

Richard De St Croix

@s0apy

·

46s

Replying to

@MichaelRosenYes

Great. We were taught it by a US summer worker - "got ma gun in ma pocket" has a great percussive hit to it in a southern accent. And the bear doesn't die of course, it's just so you don't have to be too scared. Swish, swish, swish!

My poetry books for adults

 Bloody Liars (self-published)

You Are, Aren't You? (Five Leaves and Jewish Socialist Group)

Carrying the Elephant (Penguin)

This is not my Nose (Penguin)

In the Colonie (Penguin)

Selected Poems (Penguin)

The Skin of Your Back (Five Leaves)

Don't Mention the Children (Smokestack)

Listening to a Pogrom on the Radio (Smokestack)

Mr Mensh (Smokestack)

The Advantages of Nearly Dying (Smokestack)

Many Different Kinds of Love (Penguin) 

Pebbles (Smokestack)

My books about reading, poetry and writing (all mostly in a educational contexts)

 'What is a Bong Tree? Articles and talks 1976-2021' (edited by John Richmond)

'Write to Feel Right' in the Big Cat series, published by HarperCollins Educational 

'What is Poetry? The essential guide to reading and writing poems' (Walker Books) 

'Poetry and Stories for Primary and Lower Secondary Schools' (self-published, available through my website)

'Good Ideas, how to be your child's (and your own) best teacher' (published by John Murray)

'Michael Rosen's Book of Play' (published by Wellcome Books) 

'Reading for Pleasure' (self-published, available through my website)

'A Year with Poetry' (out of print but available second hand, or in the CLPE libary)

'I see a Voice' (out of print but available second hand)

'Did I Hear You Write?' (out of print but available second hand)

'I never know how poems start...' (Big Cat series - Collins)

'Why Write? Why Read?' (self-published, available through my website)

'The Author' (based on my PhD) (self-published, available through my website)

'Writing for Pleasure' (self-published, available through my website)

'Michael Rosen's Poetry Videos; how to get children writing and performing poems too' (with Jonny Walker) (self-published, available through my website)

'How to Make Children Laugh' (published by Quercus) 

'Alphabetical, how every letter tells a story' (published by John Murray)

(There's also a chapter on writing, directed at adult readers, in 'Getting Better' my book about overcoming (or trying to overcome) trauma and loss; published by Penguin) 

[Special note for the book 'Children's Literature in Action' edited by Richard Charlesworth, Deborah Friedland and Helen Jones. 

This is a book of many of the research projects by students (most of whom are teachers) on our MA in Children's Literature at Goldsmiths University of London, doing 'Children's Literature in Action' ie studying how children read. They set up research projects looking closely at children's responses to books.

It's available online, free of charge here:

https://cpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gold.ac.uk/dist/a/99/files/2022/09/Childrens-Literature-in-Action-E-Book.pdf  ]

Most of these books are available here:

https://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/books/

Ofsted try to 'do' literature and end up with pap

 This comes from the new Ofsted Subject Report for English:

There's a lot here to chew over: it's the kind of report that doesn't stoop to give evidence. So with one word (the opening word),  'Occasionally...',  the need to provide evidence for the statement that follows is swept aside. It's one of those lovely, fuzzy words that can cover any complex phenomenon. Something somewhere always happens 'occasionally'. It's unassailable and so, the writers of this report hope, can't be disproved. Clever but not clever. 

'In these schools...' - this is phoney specificity. Having said 'occasionally', the authors think they're covered to say 'these schools' as if we the readers are now holders of the evidence of which schools. In fact, not. It's rhetorical hoodwinking. 

'...focus on issues of social justice or that pupils are able to access more easily.' A long time ago, someone noticed that the thing about Metaphysical poetry is that it 'yokes' together unexpected and heterogeneous images. This is a good example. The reasons why teachers might choose books that focus on issues of social justice are not necessarily anything to do with why teachers might choose books that are easy to access. In fact, I've seen teachers (and myself with my own kids) hold our noses over issues of social justice, when we've seen a child struggling to read, really taking off with a book that was easy to read but had questionable content. Mea culpa, but yoking these two elements here suggests an ideology behind the writing of this Ofsted document. It reeks of suspicion of teachers that they are funnelling literature into classrooms that is both focussed on social justice AND trashy. Again, no evidence given, but it works as a smear. 

Line 5: 'literary merit'. What is this? Of course, here it goes undefined, as if we the readers and they, Ofsted, live in a world in which we agree as much on what is literary merit as we do over accepting the law of gravity. This too is an ideological trick. The writer scoops up the reader into an assumption that we are supposed to accept without question. In fact, the concept of 'literary merit' is highly contested. We know that critics and academics are in permanent conversation about literature, and that's part of the general conversation in the 'republic of letters'. Long may it last. But trumpeting from a postion of power and privilege that there is some kind of objective gold standard of literary merit, is not part of that conversation. It's power-play. Control through privilege. I'm not even going to try to mind-read what texts the authors have in mind. What's more significant is that they think that they can bully teachers with such a term, as if they are trying to make teachers nervous that a text they have chosen for KS3 students does NOT have literary merit. Well, there's hardly a text in the world that hasn't at some time or another been chastised by someone for not having literary merit! Remember, there were purists who once had a go at Shakespeare because his iambic pentameter was irregular and ragged! One of the least satisfactory games played by some critics and academics is to joust with texts as if it's their job to find holes and weaknesses in them. I can't think of how many times I've read criticism both in national newsapers and academic journals that seek to 'prove' that a given text is not quite as 'good' as it should be, or as not so worthy of praise as others say that it is. Even so, here this phrase hangs in the air like a critical policeman's baton. 

Then comes an extraordinary sentence: 'Schools do not consider how the study of these texts might prepare pupils for further encounters with even more complex texts, as opposed to developing their understanding of issues such as homelessness.'

'Schools...' Which schools? This is an absurd generality. I read such generalities in newspapers every day, as with  what 'men', 'women', 'children' supposedly all think or do, along with use (of course) of many racialised epithets. In these examples, we call it stereotyping but in essence, it's the same process going on here. Are the authors of this document  aware of this and are using it to bully teachers or, laughably, are they not aware of it themselves? I don't know!

The proposition of the sentence holds within it an ideology around what is the purpose of the study of English in schools: it attacks the notion that we ask students to read texts that matter to them, in the here and now (an existential argument, if you like) , and proposes that we read texts at some pre-ordained idea of 'level' in order that we might proceed to a higher level in the tomorrow. It's the 'ladder' model of literary consumption: that we move from simple to hard, from naive to complex, from accessible to texts that require prior knowledge...and so on. Note here that it's the text that is supposedly developmental not the student! It's as if a text has a pre-ordained place on the ladder, and that every student should match up to that ladder's rungs. We know that most KS3 students are at a complex stage in human and psychological development. One of the fascinating and difficult things about working with students of that age is that within any one class, there will be students who appear to be miles apart in psychological, physical, emotional and social development. Slapping on to them a mythic ladder of texts and justifying why you're reading one text on the basis that it 'leads' to the next, is to deny the very circumstances of the students doing this. But then, that is indeed the ideology being recommended here, and it's been on the agenda from the very start of the Govean revolution. The student is irrelevant. Only the text and the knowledge of the text is relevant. It goes without saying, this turns the curriculum into perfect exam-fodder. An exam tests specific aptitudes in relation to a fixed, common text. It can't empathise with the conditions of the candidate. Education is constantly entangled with the thorns of this dilemma. This report is quite clear: teach the ladder. 

'...understanding of issues such as homelessness.' This is the cry of the literary purist who has spent decades being infuriated that millions of people read in order to find out about the world. They hate what they decry as 'sociological' writing and reading. Notice the deliberate selection of 'homelessness'. It's a nice piece of bathos slotted in at the end of a sentence: a deliberate attempt to contrast the heights of 'further encounters with complex texts' with 'homelessness'. The joke is that the phrase 'further encounters with complex texts' is anything but a height. It's classic bureaucratic mincemeat. When we look at it, we can see that it's probably referring to some wonderful books, plays and poems, but because this report is evidence-less pap, we are given bureaucratic banality. And then they slug us with the horror that we might read a text about a family made homeless. What? Like Joseph and Mary? 

Further travels in the land of banality come with the last sentence when we find literature is reduced to something called challenging vocabulary and structures. Quite funny, isn't it, that on the one hand the passage trumpets the undefinable, abstract 'literary merit' and on the other gives us something as dry and dull as challenging vocabulary and structures. Just to be clear, this is TV quiz game stuff: 'hard words' and 'hard sentences'. 

Now we know what these people think reading in schools should be for. We are in pursuit of the ineffable, unfindable mirage of 'literary merit'  while doing hard words and hard structures because next year, there'll be harder words and harder structures. 

Who was it who talked of 'poverty of the imagination'. I've forgotten. But there's a lot of it going on here.