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12 April 2019

It ain't what you do....

It Ain’t What You Do, It’s what it does to you


Tonight we did a bit of poetry, I’ve been thinking of Simon Armitage’s poem , It ain’t what you do its what it does to you, for the simplicity of the poem and the way the metaphysical invocation of the ending has always had an impact on me; ‘that feeling, I mean’.


It’s a poem familiar to anyone about my age as it was a fairly standard GCSE exam text for a few years. It’s possibly the only English set text I enjoyed at the time.  I think I was too rebellious for anything else. But this one stood out.


To get us started I tried out a new task for some quick fire poetry - each participant wrote down 4 separate short sentences / statements which we then shared about and used each line as the start for a new stanza in a poem.


After the break we looked at Armitage’s poem and discussed the feelings and meaning we got from it, before having a go with one of our own, using the same  structure;


I have not.....












But I have....


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