The Hill Stands Strong and Brave

2nd Session: Toothill School Long Poem workshop

This week we used some surrealist techniques for creating lines about Toothill. After reading,  A Martian Sends a Postcard Home by Craig Raine, I asked the group to look through their journals for words that would inspire poetic lines for our long poem and to think about Toothill as if it was the first time they had visited it. They would be reporting back on what they found. We played an Exquisite Corpse, a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence (similar to the game consequences). The results were fantastic. Each student ended up with 8 lines to form a new poem about Toothill made up of lines from themselves and their group. 'The hill stands strong and brave,' and 'toadstalls and knomes in a pretty garden,' and 'seagulls flying above me, time to cover my head!'

The poems that came out of the compositions were remarkable but remain in the journals of  the group. I hope we can share some here later.

We were joined by Roger Ogle of the Link Magazine, a well known community friend. Roger was able to talk to us about The Watchers, a statue that stands at Toothill Community Centre. He asked the children why it might be called The Watchers.

It's a family watching over one another.

It represents the community taking care.

Like a nest of dolls, nest of people.

Like a family sheltered.

It could be a mother with her daughter.


I wondered if the statue had anything to do with the place name of Toothill, a place of watching, a lookout.

Luke said the statue reminded him of a Russian Doll.

a small version of the Toothill 'Watchers'
on display in Toothill School

We had a chat about the hill behind Toothill School: we call it 'Mud Hill' and play football there, or 'The Mound' or 'The Hills'.

We talked about the power of sound in a poem and how it can create music. The word TOOT has a musical presence that we can make use of and we brainstormed lots of words that sounded like TOOT to use in our long poem: cute, soot, loot, compute etc. We then read the Ning Nang Nong by Spike Milliagan so get a real sense of the power of sound and assonance.

I have given each student a post card with a stamp on it and my address and asked them to post me a poem from Toothill. There will be prizes and I am so excited to see what comes in the post this week! Each poem will be recorded on the blog.

I plan to deliver postcards to all year 6 students in each school this week. All they will need is a stamp, inspiration and great words of Toothill!