Storytelling Starters ~ Cry from the heart
Saturday, April 25th, 2015In the library this week, I picked a slim little volume called Search Party off the New Books shelves. ‘Wow,’ I thought when I opened it up and saw poems about poverty and homelessness, disadvantaged kids, aspiration and anger and love.
George the Poet
George the Poet is a young black British man. His parents came from Uganda. He succeeded in getting into Cambridge where he studied politics for six years. But he wasn’t happy with where that was leading. Now he is a rap poet. He has a strong and powerful voice and he’s using it to express what he feels needs expressing.
George the Poet’s poetry challenges all complacencies, for example about the way disadvantaged children fall behind in school. I hope he gets widely heard. He not only has the intelligence and the language to speak out in protest. He also has some spot-on ideas about how to change things.
School Blues
School Blues begins by clearly stating – with accompanying statistics – how children from disadvantaged backgrounds enter secondary school with lower literacy skills than their peers. The second verse begins like this:
It’s time to stage an intervention –
One that’s designed for engaging their attention. (more…)