‘She showed what poetry can do’: young London laureates feel the Amanda Gorman effect

Cecilia Knapp

“I came to poetry by accident, through a workshop at Camden’s Roundhouse. I was 18 at the time, had no money, and was living alone in London. Poetry had not been in my life before. I was awful when I started. But I was so thirsty to get better.

I’m working on my first collection now. I lost my mum at a young age, so a lot of the collection looks at how that might impact a young woman. And I lost my older brother to suicide in 2012. He had a long battle with addiction, and also his sexuality, and I was a carer for him for a really long time. A lot of the poems in the book that I’m working on are looking at his life. I’ve always used writing as a way to figure things out: not necessarily to find answers, more to ask questions about them.

When young people see a poem or film on YouTube or social media, it gets rid of that preconception that poetry has to be this isolated, solitary act of opening a book and reading something old fashioned. I love reading poetry myself, and I believe that young people can, too, but they can also love spoken word or performance poetry, poetry on film or poetry with music.

I’ve worked with young people for almost a decade now, and I’ve experienced first-hand the impact poetry can have on them – something happens when you let yourself be free and creative, it is magic. It’s really empowering for young people to be told that what they have to say is important and valid. We need young voices contributing to the canon, because they usually reflect what’s really going on in the world a lot of the time.

Someone who I use as a springboard for young people is Danez Smith, a non-binary African American poet who talks a lot about race, class, sexuality and gender in their collections Don’t Call Us Dead and Homie.

Roger Robinson’s book A Portable Paradise responded so amazingly to the injustice of Grenfell, as did Jay Bernard’s book Surge. There are so many amazing writers at the moment.”

Theresa Lola (2019)

“I always loved writing, I just wanted to tell stories. Then when I was about 13, living in Nigeria, I went on a school trip to a poetry festival and it became poetry that I wanted to write.

The laureateship was one of those emails you get that you’re like, “what?” I knew my focus was going to be wellbeing. The epidemic has exacerbated this, however at the time there was numerous give attention to the psychological well being disaster amongst young individuals and I needed to deal with that – and to write down about our joys, too: the issues that convey us happiness. I did educating residencies, together with ones on hope at St Paul’s Cathedral, and one geared toward young girls about psychological well being and physique picture at Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham.

Poetry has this glorious reward of permitting us to be imaginative and permitting us to articulate even the most advanced emotions. And there’s an influence in that, particularly if you’re writing about issues that make you feel powerless. There is an influence in having your individual voice, and having some form of management of the way you share that story.

To have poetry make nationwide headlines after Joe Biden’s inauguration was simply so thrilling. Let’s be sincere, that individual inauguration was one like no different, so to have Amanda Gorman’s poem with the ability to articulate everybody’s emotions, the emotions of the previous, the current and the future – that was simply the excellent instance of what poetry can do.”

Caleb Femi (2016)

When I used to be supplied the laureateship, I had simply left educating and had no thought what I used to be going to do for work. I simply knew that I needed to be a author, and I needed to have interaction with young individuals in a manner that was loads freer than the confines of the curriculum. When the gig was supplied to me, I used to be ecstatic.