ABOUT MIKE

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I started writing poetry in my late forties, only beginning to perform it, several years later, in February, 2002, when I asked The Gate Arts Theatre in Goole if they would let me do a full evening performance. They readily agreed. Until then, it was Maggie, my wife, who endured the role of listener/audience!

When performing, I always try to include one or two poems written by my Dad who didn't start writing what he called his 'doggerel verse' until he was in his mid-sixties, and who never got the chance to fully develop his 'voice', a 'voice' which I recognise in my own thought and language patterns!

I have never thought of myself as, or called myself, a poet, but when your mind and body won't let go of certain rhythms, rhymes and language, emanating from who knows where, then all you can do is 'go with it' and see what the outcome is!

Words, parts of words and groups of words are not neutral objects or feeling-free zones. T.S. Eliot once said that we feel before we understand, and the more that children can energise language through movement and voice colour - what I call pumping up the language - the more that feelings will engage and understandings will follow.

What I write and perform turns over the soil of our shared, ordinary, everyday experience: I hope that it engages and entertains. I simply see myself as someone who has found, pretty late in life, that he enjoys writing and performing poems - if and when, that is, the 'ideas' offer themselves. I never go looking.

It has taken me something like forty years to 'find my voice', having l left school unaware that I had a 'voice' i.e. the distinctive way of seeing and saying which we all possess. At secondary school, we only ever spent time responding to the literary forms of published (dead) authors - usually selected by examining boards, or by the teachers with an eye on what examining boards might set before us.

Even today, there continues to be far too much emphasis on given literary forms and the cultural inheritance selected for us. In a school world of league tables, constant testing and pressured curriculums, there is little emphasis on helping children find their 'voice'. If young learners spent less time analysing literary forms produced by the 'great and the good' - yes, it still goes on! - and more time shaping their own as the product of their unique 'voices', then we might produce the true 'literary democracy', whereby everyone's 'voice' creates its own form.

From 1992, with long-time friend and colleague, Ben Brunwin, I also provided in-service training for primary/middle-school teachers of Literacy (Oh, how I still hate that word) and Language Development via the unique 'course in the classroom'.

In 2004, Ben and I formed our own training company, Working With Your Children, Ltd, staying true to the ethic that the best form of training for teachers is in the classroom with the children.

Tragically, in March, 2008, Ben, the driving force behind W.W,Y.C. Ltd, died of Leukaemia, and I made the decision to concentrate solely on writing and performing poetry.

And that's where I am 'today'!