Introduction

Cat Brogan is a performance poet from Northern Ireland whose work engages deeply with the themes of identity, social justice, and cultural belonging. Originating from Omagh, County Tyrone, she began writing poetry at a young age and went on to develop a distinctive voice that bridges personal experience with political commentary. Her trajectory, from participating in Irish Feis recitation competitions to winning the BBC Edinburgh Fringe Poetry Slam in 2011, reflects both a sustained commitment to the spoken word tradition and a deep engagement with the communities and contexts from which she writes.

A graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London, where she completed the MA Writer/Teacher programme, Brogan combines her literary practice with an active career in education. She has worked as a spoken word educator at The Lammas School in London and at other institutions, empowering students, particularly those from marginalised or multilingual backgrounds, to articulate their experiences through poetry. Some of their work can be viewed on the YouTube channel Spoken Word Lammas (n.d.). Her pedagogical approach emphasises creative self-expression as a route to critical literacy, advocating for the value of personal voice in educational spaces often dominated by rigid structures and standardised texts. As a result of her mentoring, her students have won major creativity prizes, including the Young Muslim Writers Award and the Adobe Youth Voices Award.

In her TEDx talk, A Poet’s Guide to Surviving School, Brogan (2016) explores how poetry can empower students to find their voice, express emotions, and connect with others. She shows that, in a rigid academic environment, poetry offers creative freedom and becomes a tool for self-discovery and reflection. By writing and performing their own work, students build confidence and develop empathy through shared vulnerability. Brogan also highlights the role of teachers as guides who nurture student expression rather than simply assess it, ultimately transforming the classroom into a space of authenticity, growth, and connection.

Her ethos as a poet and educator is reflected in her educational and activist work, including organising Omagh’s first Pride Parade in 2021 and conducting research on spoken word education with support from Arts Council England and the British Council. In an interview, Brogan said that she came out at the age of 23 after moving to London (Holland 2021). Through writing and performing poetry there and later in Malaysia, she found a powerful means of catharsis and self-expression, allowing her to articulate complex aspects of her identity. Her commitment to creative expression is deeply tied to a broader critique of institutional resistance to critical thought. In another interview she observed,

A lot of the stuff the kids wanna write is political. They wanna talk about […] the issues that are affecting them and I think government and schools are quite scared of that. They don’t want free-thinkers, and they don’t want critical thinkers and that’s what writing and creativity allows you to do. (Cited in Leah 2017)

Brogan’s poetry is informed by a strong political consciousness. Her performances address a wide range of issues including class, gender, sexuality, migration, and post-colonial identity. She has performed internationally, from the United States to Southeast Asia, and has been featured on BBC Radio 4, RTÉ, and at major literary festivals. Her work resists easy categorisation, blending autobiographical narrative, lyrical experimentation, and social critique in a way that is both accessible and intellectually resonant.

Divided into five main parts, this interview explores Brogan’s development as a poet and educator, her reflections on cultural identity, and her belief in the transformative potential of poetry, whether on the page or in performance, in the classroom or beyond. Held in person in Dublin, the interview with Brogan is part of ongoing research that seeks to examine contemporary poets’ views on poetry education (Xerri 2012, 2014a, 2014b, 2016a, 2016b, 2017a, 2017b, 2018, 2024a, 2024b, 2024c, 2024d, 2025).

Origins as a Poet

Daniel Xerri: How long have you been writing poetry? And why did you start?

Cat Brogan: Since primary school. So, I guess from six years of age. I think I started because poetry was always around me. My mum used to recite poems, and it was just kind of in the air. Then in primary school, I remember writing this poem about being bullied, and my teacher sent me around all the other classes to read it out aloud.

I also did this thing called the Feis, which is like a national competition in Ireland for Irish singing, fiddle playing, dancing, all of that. And there’s a poetry recitation part too. I used to enter that from when I was about six, learning a poem and reciting it. There’d be like 200 kids all saying the same poem. I used to win gold medals and everything. So that kind of became my thing, the thing I was good at in school. The way some people do sports or join the choir, for me it was writing and performing poetry.

DX: Some poets have mentioned to me that teachers of English were particularly influential in their formation as poets. Was this something that you experienced as well?

CB: Definitely! I was really encouraged by my teachers. I had two amazing teachers in primary school who really saw my spark and encouraged it. I’m dyslexic, and I always had messy handwriting and spelt everything wrong. But I was really lucky to have this one teacher for three years in primary school. She stayed with our class the whole time and she really encouraged me. I went back to see her when I was in my early twenties, and she was like, “Are you still writing poetry?” She actually remembered that I wrote poetry. She’d always encouraged me and wanted to see what I was working on.

Then in secondary school, it was like nothing at all. Which I think is such a shame. In primary, creative writing is encouraged. You get up in front of the class to perform your poem or whatever. But in secondary, you don’t do that. There’s very little encouragement for that kind of thing. I used to get my dad to take me to public speaking competitions. He’d take a day off work just to take me because my school wouldn’t. I’d find out about them myself, independently.

Then when I was 15, I went to America on this peace and reconciliation trip. They take Catholics and Protestants to the U.S. and everyone’s meant to live in peace and harmony. I used to write poetry on this GeoCities website. My friends in America and I would write poems, critique each other’s work, and respond with poems of our own. That was a big part of it too. And of course, some poems were for boyfriends as well.

DX: In primary school, your efforts to write poetry were encouraged but this was not the case in secondary school. What was the difference between the two contexts?

CB: I think I didn’t really have a teacher who saw my creative potential; they were too distracted by my secretarial errors from the dyslexia right up until I was about 16. Then I had this really amazing teacher. She was so cool. She’d lived in Zambia and was this strong, single older woman who had done an MA in Irish Literature. She was incredible.

But even then, I didn’t show her my poems. I think it was partly because, as a teenager, what I was writing wasn’t really school-appropriate. It was more conflicted: writing that railed against the school system, or explored things like sexuality or death. They weren’t exactly school-friendly topics. In primary school, it felt okay to write poems about being bullied or how annoying it is that you have to brush your hair. But in secondary school, the content changes. It’s more like this angsty stuff that lives in your journal under the bed. The kind of thing you don’t really want to show to an adult.

DX: Where were you born?

CB: I was born in Omagh, which is around 70 miles to the west of Belfast. It’s a small town of about 20,000 people.

DX: You’re probably aware of the idea that when you read travel writing, the experience of the destination is mediated via the writing itself. Have you written any poetry about the places you’ve lived in?

CB: London most recently, but Omagh before that, yes. A lot of my poetry has come out of being from Omagh. I left when I was 18 to go to university, and that’s when I had a kind of explosion in how much I was writing. A lot of that came from the tension of being Irish in Britain, and trying to come to terms with what my Irish identity actually was, especially being from Northern Ireland, which carries this sort of contested identity.

There was also this feeling of being British, of being from the UK, and then going to England and realising I was not that. And that they didn’t see me as British. They didn’t see me as from the UK. That hit hard. I found it really difficult: to be perceived as a foreigner, to have this strong accent, to be this big personality who talks very fast. I just felt very othered.

I was studying Politics and English, so that also fed into what I was writing. Then, in the summer after my first year, I went to Kenya. And I wrote so much in Kenya, like a huge amount. I think a lot of that came out of feeling so alien in England, and then feeling really at home in Kenya. I recognised so many cultural traits there that I didn’t see in England.

DX: Why was that?

CB: I felt more at home in Kenya because people were just friendlier. It’s all about the visitor: if someone comes in, everyone has to be fed, and you’re always expected to bring something. People laugh loudly, they speak loudly, they’re very physical. There’s a warmth and openness. Whereas in England, there’s this kind of invisible wall between people, a sort of stiffness. And even the way people relate to each other: it’s all very jokey and banter-based, and you’re constantly digging into each other. Those were things I’d never really noticed before. You don’t always see those things when you’re in a place. It’s not so much about living in a place; it’s the leaving of it, and living somewhere else, that allows you to really see it. That’s when you realise the things you miss, and the things you value in your own culture.

Before I left Northern Ireland, I saw it as a place of drinking and violence. It wasn’t a culture I felt I belonged to or was proud of. But the further away I lived, the more I started to appreciate it and began to understand what it actually meant. I started to recognise it as a post-colonial place, and that’s something I really connected with in Kenya too. Kenya is also post-colonial, also tribal, also wrestling with this inherited relationship to the metropole, to the centre of empire, and with the cultural hierarchies that come from that. This whole sense of what’s valued, what’s seen as proper or important, and what’s not. This comes out in my poetry too.

DX: Do you always write poetry to be performed?

CB: I’ve always done that, from the very beginning. From early on, I saw poetry as something quite ephemeral. It went in birthday cards, or I’d write a poem when I was leaving home. I remember writing one for my mum, and that was the first poem of mine that really had an audience. My dad actually read it out at an event during which my mum was giving a speech. That moment gave me this feeling of, “Oh, maybe people do want to hear my work. Maybe this is something that can resonate with others”.

I’ve always wanted it to be performed. I’ve always felt insecure about myself as a writer. Again, going back to being the kid with the bad handwriting, the bad spelling, not trusting myself fully on the page. But when I was there, performing it, that added something I felt the writing didn’t have on its own.

Also, I write with the rhythms and resonance of my speech. I have a very specific accent; that’s built into the writing. I’ve always written for the voice because the poetry I was exposed to consisted of things by Yeats and Tennyson, ballads, and song lyrics. Song lyrics have been a huge influence; they’re absolutely essential for me.

Later on, in early adulthood, I got a lot of my stage experience from emceeing. I was part of a sound system, and we had our own rig; we’d put on nights and bring up DJs from London. I’d be on the mic, hosting, emceeing over hip hop and dubstep. That’s where the mic was, that’s where the stage was, and that’s what people wanted to listen to in the cultural milieu I was part of. And it had to rhyme, had to fit a certain number of beats in the bar. Counting syllables, keeping a metre, all of that. It was poetic but also musical. That structure really shaped the way I wrote and performed.

Poetry’s Status in Contemporary Culture

DX: Over the past century or so, some people have voiced concern about the status of poetry in contemporary culture. They maintain that poetry is experiencing a crisis and that its readership is in decline. From your experience as a spoken word artist working with young people in educational contexts, do you consider such sentiments to be valid?

CB: I think it depends on what you’re looking back to, what our concept of poetry has been in our culture historically. Lately, I’ve become more and more interested in the political thread of poetry in Ireland, even going back to the 10th century when every chieftain had a bard. That was a royal appointment. The bard was the keeper of the family history, the recorder of events, the one who commemorated big occasions through poetry. They’d be sent off to bardic school for seven years, an entire education paid for by the chief. It was a highly revered position.

I suppose the modern equivalent is someone like Carol Ann Duffy getting £5,000 a year and a bottle of sherry. I guess that’s nice, but it’s hardly the same. That older tradition was very much about oral poetry, even though writing was also crucial. It’s important to push back on this idea that Gaelic culture was just oral, as if it didn’t value writing. That’s simply not true. Ireland has a deep literary history, but poetry did live, first and foremost, in public performance.

I think poetry has struggled more with the shift to print media. Once it was bound in books, people weren’t necessarily experiencing it live anymore. But even then, you had poets like Byron, who was basically the Ed Sheeran of his time. He was a celebrity. So maybe it’s actually in the 20th century that poetry really started to decline in public life.

But now, in the digital age, I think poetry is re-emerging in a new way. It can be heard and seen again. Up until a few years ago, you had platforms like Def Poetry Jam, which had millions of views. You’ve got people like Suli Breaks with his “Education” poem, which has had massive reach. There’s definitely more appetite now for people to watch poetry, to engage with it online.

Of course, there’s a question about quality. Some of what’s out there, I wouldn’t call it poetry. I don’t think it should be passed off as poetry just because it fits a certain aesthetic or gets views. There’s a danger in letting those surface-level performances define what people think poetry is. But maybe that’s just part of the growing pains. We’ve only had digital platforms for poetry for a few decades. So maybe it’s still in a kind of moody juvenile phase. It’s still figuring itself out.

DX: Some spoken word artists have told me that poetry has hit rock bottom, but now it’s on its way back up thanks to spoken word. Is this something that you agree with?

CB: I think that whenever you are part of a genre, you always feel like you’re on the brink of something, that it’s just about to break through. I think people have been saying that about spoken word for the last twenty years or so. That’s certainly been the case for as long as I’ve been professionally involved in poetry.

In America, I think it reached a kind of high point around 2008–2010, especially with the Def Poetry Jam era intersecting with HBO. But even before that, in the 1980s, you had Gil Scott-Heron, a massive legend. And people like Linton Kwesi Johnson, who’s still incredible. All the dub poets: that was a huge movement. I don’t even know if we’ve gotten back to that level yet. Do we have our Gil Scott-Heron now? I don’t think we do. Not yet. So, I don’t know. I think we always believe we’re riding the crest of a wave, but spoken word still hasn’t quite found its way to communicate in a mass media space the way it needs to.

Gil Scott-Heron had his beats in the background, he was tapped into the zeitgeist. He was on the pulse. A lot of the poems that go viral today do so more because of the issues they deal with than the poem itself, its style or craft. People share these poems because they hit something they agree with, something they believe in. It’s easy to like and share poems that align with your values. But it’s not necessarily about the quality or originality of the form. Unless the style is there, it can’t really last. That’s why “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is still a classic: it had the issue, yes, but it also had the style. The form was strong, not just the message. Whereas I think now the message is often there, but the style’s still catching up.

Poetry’s Place in Education

DX: How solid, in your opinion, is poetry’s place in education?

CB: I mean, poetry is a big chunk of the GCSE in the UK. But I think a lot of teachers are quite scared of poetry because it really demands a personal response from the students in order for them to get top marks. And with the recent changes to the GCSE, that’s become even more the case. There’s now a much bigger emphasis on unseen poetry. Before, you had the anthology, you learnt the poems by heart, you knew the key themes, and there was a set structure, like a rubric, that helped you know what to compare and how. Now, with more unseen elements, students are expected to respond using their own brains. I think that terrifies a lot of teachers because the system is quite control-freaky.

But honestly, I think there’s a huge opportunity here. What we should be teaching is critical thinking, independent learning, personal response, creativity. That’s what we need, not just for the current economic environment, but for being happy, well-rounded people. I don’t know if the teaching approach is quite as bad as it used to be. I feel like there’s been a bit of a shift, a bit of a turn toward openness, I hope. But then again, the government has taken a lot of contemporary poets and poets of colour off the syllabus. Now it’s mostly just dead old white men. The only one who’s even slightly different is Oscar Wilde, and maybe Christina Rossetti if she’s still on there. Maya Angelou was on it for a while, but it felt like that was only acceptable because she had just died.

The syllabus is really poor in terms of contemporary representation. That’s a real shame, because if poetry is going to remain vital, it has to respond to the world people are actually living in, to what they’re seeing and experiencing now. It has to use their language. It has to speak to people in a way that, frankly, a lot of Victorian poets just can’t. Even the syntax is a barrier. Young people can’t relate to that.

DX: What should be done to promote poetry even more broadly in education?

CB: I think it’s about getting kids to write their own poetry. That’s what inspires me when it comes to literacy. As someone who’s dyslexic, I was never the kind of reader my sister was. She’d fly through books and absolutely loved reading. But I was always someone who loved writing. I always had a notebook and a pen on me. That was my route into literacy: through being a writer. That’s what keeps me interested in writing: I approach it as a writer.

The thing is, in all the exams, what do students have to do? Write. But so many kids today can’t even hold a pen properly, or can’t write for more than 20 minutes without their hand getting sore. They’re not even used to the mechanics, the physical, muscular effort of writing. So, if we encourage kids to write creatively, we bring in the ones who aren’t necessarily inspired by reading, who find it hard or off-putting. More than that, it helps them understand writing. It makes them think, “Why did the writer choose this word?” They will have experienced what it’s like to search for the right word themselves. To land on it. To feel that satisfaction when it clicks. That’s so different from just being told, “Read this text and write an essay about it”. You’re left thinking, “Why am I writing this essay? Why does it matter that the curtains are blue? I don’t care that the curtains are blue. The curtains were probably just blue!” But when you’ve written something yourself, you know what it means to choose that word, to be deliberate.

There’s just not enough of that. Not enough encouragement for students to write and to be creative, and to be free in their writing. Not enough permission to stop worrying about spelling or handwriting or neatness. I always say to my students, “Don’t worry about that”. I even show them my own notebooks and say, “Imagine what kind of mark I’d get for this in your school”. I’ve seen kids have pages ripped out of their copybooks by teachers who said it was too messy and didn’t belong in there. Like the appearance of the book mattered more than the poem inside. It becomes all about keeping the book tidy, underlining everything, making it neat. When it should be about expression, creativity, and letting young people find their own voices.

Teaching Poetry Writing

DX: What are the benefits of teaching poetry writing to young people?

CB: It makes them connect with themselves. When you finish writing something, you can say, “I didn’t even know I felt like that”. You do this kind of free-write, and suddenly all this stuff comes up. This happened when I wrote about my brother. I hadn’t even realised what weighed on my mind. And then the next time I saw him, it was clear: there was all this unresolved stuff that came out because I’d written it.

Writing helps you connect with what’s going on inside you, in a really deep, subconscious way. From that, it also helps you connect with other people. Because once I’ve discovered something about myself, I can put that into a poem, and suddenly I’m able to show someone who I am in a way I wouldn’t be able to in conversation. There isn’t always time or space for those kinds of chats. It can make people uncomfortable. You’re not just going to blurt out, “Oh, here’s the story of when my granny died” or “Here’s what happened when my auntie’s house in Nigeria was burnt down”. But with poetry, you get the chance to crystallise something and present it to the world. Through that, people can connect with you and you can connect with them. You hear their stories, you feel what they feel, you get goosebumps. That’s when conversations start to happen.

Writing poetry also helps you connect with culture. Those are the three strands of my dissertation: character, community, and culture. Instead of just being a passive recipient of culture – “Oh, this is a nice book, this is a good play, that’s a cool song” – you become an active participant. You start saying, “Hmm, I like that imagery in the lyric”, or “I see what they’re doing with the structure there”. You begin to engage with culture not just as a consumer, but as a creator. That gives you a completely different and much richer experience. It helps you evaluate culture on another level, and you don’t feel like you’re down here while culture is up there, inaccessible. You feel inspired by it rather than intimidated. You feel like part of a creative community, not just someone sitting in the audience while the “real” artist is up on the stage.

DX: When you run a poetry writing workshop for young people, what are your objectives? What do you hope to achieve by the end of it?

CB: By the end of the day, I would hope that everyone has something on the page they feel proud of. I work with a lot of students who speak English as an additional language, and many with special educational needs, so expectations often have to be adjusted. But even if it’s just one line, I’ve seen how they can look back over that line and feel genuinely proud. What matters most is that everyone writes something. And even better, if they get up and perform it. But that takes work; it doesn’t happen overnight. I had to do some hard graft in my career to get to that point, especially around building young people’s confidence.

One of the schools I worked at was a Catholic institution; it was oversubscribed and super structured. If you asked kids to perform, loads would volunteer. The whole system was geared towards that. Parents really wanted their kids to be at that school; they were committed, even to the point of going and getting baptised just to get a place. However, another school I worked at was undersubscribed. We might be in the middle of a lesson and a new student would walk in. Maybe a newly arrived refugee from Syria with no parents. That was the reality. So, asking students whether they wanted to perform – in a foreign language, in front of people they didn’t know – was obviously difficult because they were likely to refuse. Why would they want to stand up and talk about their feelings, or share something deeply personal? For them, hardship wasn’t about Santa not being real; it was about war, loss, and displacement.

So, I had to be creative. I came up with this thing where each student would just pick one line, something small. Then I’d get them all up, and we’d arrange the lines. I’d say, “Your line sounds good as the last one. Let’s put you at the end”. I called it the Mexican wave: each student performed their line, one after the other. And I recorded it. That changed everything. Suddenly, they knew they had to be quiet and listen because we were recording the session. Then I’d play it back for them.

DX: How do young people usually respond to these kinds of workshops?

CB: After a few years, I could really see the difference from when I first started doing workshops with young people. At the beginning, there was a lot of resistance: no one wanted to do poetry. But after a while, a real poetry culture emerged at the schools where I worked. Those kids I worked with for a few years ended up writing amazing stuff. I’d say, “Do a free-write”, and everyone’s quiet. After five minutes, they’re still writing. They wouldn’t want to stop. It became normalised. It was no longer this huge struggle to get something on the page.

Also, I’ve incorporated a lot of rap in my teaching; it has been a really good way in. When students find out I can rap, they’re like, “Miss, give us a rap! Give us a rap!” I even get into rap battles with eleven-year-olds. But it’s not just me bringing it to them anymore; they’re bringing it to each other. There was this one kid who had just joined the school. He came up and started rapping lyrics from a music video we had made a few months before. He already knew about it before joining; he knew the school had done this. A whole kind of cultural expectation gradually emerged. It’s like this is a thing we do here. It’s not just me showing up saying, “Hey, let’s do some poetry!”

I’ve now built up a bank of material from the kids themselves. I use their poems in my lessons. I show videos of them performing. The reaction is always like, “Wait, is that Patrick? Oh my God, that’s Patrick! I can’t believe he wrote that!” And I say, “Yes! Patrick wrote that when he’d only been in the country for five months and could barely speak any English”.

Teachers of Poetry

DX: If we were to focus on your experience of working with teachers, what are your views on their approach to poetry teaching?

CB: One of the things that’s been difficult about my role is that, ideally, the classroom teacher is meant to stay in the room during the poetry workshop. They’re supposed to be part of the session, chipping in when they want, being engaged. This would enable them to reference the workshop later in other lessons. They’re also meant to handle discipline, so I can focus on the teaching. But the reality is very different. I walk into the session and the teacher is like, “Oh! I forgot you were coming today”. Then they grab their books and disappear to catch up on marking.

I get it: teachers are completely overworked. They’ve got too many lessons, not enough prep time, and barely any breathing room. A lot of them are on horrendous amounts of cover duty. They’re doing before-school gate duty, lunch duty, after-school duty; it’s constant. There’s this extra layer of surveillance they’re responsible for now. To me, that used to be a dinner lady’s job, right? You’d hang out with the dinner lady at lunch. That was her role. But now, it’s the teachers doing all of that as well.

On top of that, they’re expected to do loads of data analysis, really hardcore maths. They have to analyse numbers, input figures, generate reports. This is especially tough for English teachers, who often go into teaching because they love books, ideas, and words rather than spreadsheets. But schools now are all about data. They run on percentages, performance metrics, and constant number crunching. It’s all about the league tables. It’s just not what a lot of teachers signed up for.

DX: The teachers that you work with are probably also teaching poetry. What are your views on the way they go about that?

CB: I think the way poetry is taught is very systematic. It’s all about annotating the poem, picking it apart in a kind of mechanical way. Instead of just reading the poem, sitting with it, and reflecting on your personal response, what it makes you feel or think, it becomes almost like poetry by numbers. You go through it asking, “Is there a rhythm? Is there a rhyme? Where’s the simile? The metaphor? The alliteration?” It’s like ticking boxes. The whole focus becomes about identifying poetic devices rather than engaging with the meaning.

What’s strange is that exam questions often ask about meaning: “What is the poet saying about death, or grief, or love? How do they use language to convey that?” So, really, it should be a 50/50 balance: the idea, the concept, the reason for writing, and then the language used to express that idea. But during teaching the emphasis seems heavily skewed toward the linguistic side. It’s more about using poetic devices to talk about the meaning, rather than starting with the meaning itself, or thinking about how you connect with it. I think that’s kind of sad. Because when poetic devices are working well, you shouldn’t even notice them. They should just serve the poem quietly, invisibly. For me, it’s like driving a car: the point is to go somewhere. You don’t need to constantly lift the bonnet and poke around in the engine. But in the classroom, it’s all about lifting the bonnet and pointing out all the parts rather than just going on the journey the poem was meant to take you on.

The focus is on spotting metaphors, similes and alliteration. Ticking it all off. Rather than it being about engaging and having a moment, it’s become something else entirely. But for me, poetry should be something that makes you feel more alive. It helps you understand yourself, and the world around you. It connects you. It allows you to travel through space, through time, through perception. It can shift how you see everything. It does all this mad stuff. And that’s awesome. That’s the exciting part. That’s the bit we should be getting students excited about.

DX: What support should teachers be given in order for them to be more effective at teaching poetry?

CB: I think teachers need to find a way of being passionate about poetry. That’s what really makes the difference. Because that’s what secondary school kids respond to. When they see someone who’s excited about a poem, or a metaphor, or some mad image, they think, “I want to be that excited too”. Even if they don’t fully get it yet, they see that their teacher thinks it’s awesome. And that curiosity kicks in: “Why do they love it so much? What is it about this that gets their juices going?”

I think what would really help is if teachers were exposed to writers – whether poets, novelists, whatever – and had some kind of creative writing element in their training and teaching practice. Because then they’d be doing exactly what we ask the kids to do. They’d be looking at writing as writers, not just as readers. They’d be thinking: “Why did I make that language choice? Why did I want to write about this? Why did that image come to me and feel like the right one?” I really believe that you can’t ask a kid to write vulnerably, to write honestly, if you’re not willing to do the same. If you’re not willing to share your own writing.

For example, my mum’s disabled. I’ll say to a class, “Here’s a poem I wrote about my mum’s disability. You can see the metaphor I’ve used here, or the alliteration there, but more importantly, this is what I wanted to say. This is something I’ve lived”. And then I’ll ask them: “Now you write. What’s it like? What’s it like to have a disabled parent? What’s it like to speak five languages? What’s it like to come from Afghanistan? What’s it like to never have met your dad?” Whatever their truth is. If I’m asking them to open up and write about their personal experiences, then I have to do it too.

If teachers were writing, really writing, and saying, “Hey, I wrote this poem. I don’t know if it’s any good. I feel a bit embarrassed, but we’re a writing community here so I’m going to share it with you. Now, I want you to write something too”. That would change everything.

DX: Do you think that kind of thing is happening in pre- and in-service teacher education?

CB: I think there are some teachers who are sharing their writing and bringing that passion into the classroom, but it’s usually the ones who are writers themselves. Or at least the ones who are being honest and open. But even then, it’s often just their own thing, rather than part of a systematic approach to teaching. There are some brilliant organisations supporting this kind of work, like the English and Media Centre. They’re fantastic. They create resources and run professional development sessions for teachers. Exactly the kind of support that can help bring creativity and authenticity into the classroom in a more structured, sustainable way. They’re linked with the Goldsmiths programme too; we had some of our seminars there. They’re brilliant. They’re really into this whole philosophy of handing back the wheel.

It’s the idea that you can’t learn to drive by sitting in the passenger seat. You’ve got to be behind the wheel. The teacher’s there beside you, giving guidance, making you feel safe, but real learning happens when it’s just you, out there at 3 a.m., with headlights coming at you from the other direction. That’s when it becomes real. That’s when you learn. That’s what we need to be encouraging students to do: take real ownership. I believe they need to see their teachers writing. That’s when they’ll feel empowered to write themselves. And teachers need to write, for lots of reasons. Even if it’s just for themselves. Even if it’s just as a release, because teaching is so stressful. Everyone’s on edge, and there’s this kind of ambient stress that builds and builds, feeding off itself. For me, writing has always been a release valve. A way of processing. Of venting. Of staying sane.

I think it’s also about encouraging students to write about personal experience. There’s often this idea that if it’s autobiographical, if it’s confessional, then it’s somehow lesser. There’s this subtle or sometimes not-so-subtle dismissal. You see it even with serious writers like Anne Sexton. That sense of, “Oh, it’s a bit emotional, it’s a bit female, it’s not really literary”. But especially for young writers, writing from personal experience is essential. You have to write what you know. That’s where you start. From that place you also tap into all the other powerful dimensions of writing: the healing side, the communal side.

For me, writing isn’t about getting booked for festivals or winning a Pulitzer. Just like football isn’t about playing for Manchester United. You can play Sunday League. You can have a great time, meet your mates, move your body, feel better. No one says, “Why are you playing football? It’s not like you’ll ever be in the Premier League”. It’s the same with writing. You write because you love it. Because it helps. Because it brings you joy. And yes, maybe someday a prize would be nice, but really, it’s about the notebook and the pen and the moment. Maybe it’s writing something for your partner, or your mum. Maybe it’s writing something silly on a birthday card, or something that makes someone smile. That’s the core of it. That’s what makes it matter.

DX: Why is it important for poets to take up a residency in schools and collaborate with teachers?

CB: It’s all about the passion. I once worked with a group of Year 11 students, the GCSE year. I took them in small groups to work on unseen poetry, and they could see how passionate I was. At first, they were a bit taken aback: “Miss, it’s really not that deep”. And I was like, “Guys, it is that deep!” Then you could see it, the penny drop moment. That’s one of the most powerful things about poetry. There’s that moment when you get it, when you’ve sat with something that feels hard or a bit inaccessible, and then boom. It clicks. You feel it. I think for a lot of those students, they’d never seen anyone that excited about poetry before.

The results spoke for themselves: we got our best GCSE poetry results that year. The scores were way up. It wasn’t because this was a particularly high-achieving cohort. It wasn’t one of those dream year groups. We had a lot of students who joined in Year 10, many with English as an additional language. This was a tough year group. So, I honestly believe it was the passion that made the difference.

Since teachers are so overstretched, they often don’t have time to go that extra step. But I do. I enter my students into competitions. I’ll go around the class saying, “Here’s a poetry competition. Send me your poem”. Then I’ll edit it with them and we’ll submit it together. And it works. One of my students won the Ledbury Poetry Prize. Another won a competition run by the University of Winchester. We all went down there together and it was hilarious. The whole crew – this very real family: the alcoholic Polish mother, the curt East End dad, the teenage girl who pretended she didn’t even like poetry – there we all were, standing proudly at the University of Winchester.

There’s a real sense of achievement when something like that happens. When it lands. Anytime I take students to something like the summer Goldsmiths conference, they’re buzzing. They’re like, “Fill your boots!” One of them brings out a full packet of biscuits. They’re just excited to be there. These are kids who, under normal circumstances, would never see the inside of a university. Their parents are cleaners, drivers, shopkeepers, if their parents are even around. Some are living with extended family members, some in overcrowded housing with 20 people sharing one kitchen. Proper Dickensian. And they don’t even know what that word means. They don’t even realise they could be part of something like this. Because they’ve never had someone drive them to a public speaking competition. They’ve never had a teacher for more than six months. They move schools every couple of years. They’re in survival mode.

If they are in a school that’s under pressure, underfunded, constantly firefighting, it’s not realistic to expect a teacher to say, “Hey, let me enter you in a poetry competition. Let’s see what happens”. But I do. I say, “Let’s make a music video. Let’s submit it”. We entered one of our projects into a global UN environmental campaign about food waste and we won. We won an international prize. $2,000. I told the kids, “This goes on your CV. This goes on your record”. How powerful is that? To say you’ve won a UN prize for your creative work? That’s huge. That’s transformational. It opens doors they didn’t even know existed.

In this way, they can start to think, “Oh, there’s this whole world out there”. Universities. Campaign organisations. Opportunities. They realise, “I’m worthy. I’m valid”. If we can get those kids at age 12 inside a university like Goldsmiths, then maybe, just maybe, they’ll start to believe, “I could go here. I could belong here”. When they walk into a lecture hall and see that everyone else is middle class and confident and polished, when they’re the ones with the “funny” accent, or the ones who are not the right colour, or the ones who don’t speak English at home, hopefully, they’ll still feel like they can hold their own in that space. Because they can. And they need to know that before someone else tells them they can’t.

DX: You’ve already touched upon this issue. How significant is it for teachers to position themselves as readers and writers of poetry?

CB: I think it’s massively important. There is this tendency to just go through the motions, but kids know if you’re not into it. They can feel it. The thing is, a lot of teachers aren’t comfortable teaching poetry. Now, with the new curriculum changes, they’re even less comfortable. In the past, some of them taught the same poems for years. They had a stack of lesson plans; all the resources were there. They had model essays and past papers. But now it’s a nightmare trying to figure out the correct specification. It’s chaotic. So of course, teachers feel overwhelmed. They’re anxious.

What they need is permission to move away from teaching by rote, to feel confident that it’s okay to have a personal response to a poem. To meet the text on its own terms. To explore it with curiosity and honesty, not just with the aim of ticking boxes or reciting SparkNotes. What we want to nurture in students isn’t just rote learning; it’s independent thinking. Critical thinking. That’s the whole point. We don’t want them to just regurgitate someone else’s opinion; we want them to form their own.

What is the point of having all these kids who know how to analyse An Inspector Calls, or Of Mice and Men, or whatever, if they can’t transfer those skills when they go on to read a different book? That’s the real issue. They’re used to summaries, to cheat sheets that tell them what everything means. So, when they go to university, they struggle. I know I did. My education was all about being spoon-fed. Everything was handed to us tightly packaged and capable of being regurgitated. I did really well in school, despite being dyslexic. But when I got to university, it was a shock. Suddenly, I had to read a novel a week, write an essay, and come to a seminar ready to discuss it with no SparkNotes, no teacher’s notes in the margins, no scaffolding. I had no tools for independent reading.

I think there’s a real opportunity here for teachers to shift their mindset. It’s not about teaching set texts; it’s about teaching text. Any text. Whether it’s a novel, a blog post, a newspaper article, or a political speech. Can students ask, “Is this biased? Is it reliable? Is it backed up? What’s the purpose of this text? How is it trying to make me feel? How is it manipulating me, and why? What’s the agenda here? What’s the subtext? What’s the context?” These are the kinds of questions that matter, especially now. Without them, kids risk being manipulated, misled, or simply left behind. We need to teach them to engage critically. To read texts as texts, not as sacred objects. To read them as constructed things that can be challenged, questioned, pulled apart. Otherwise, we’re just replacing one form of brainwashing with another. We’re not teaching them how to think; we’re teaching them what to think. And that’s not education.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Cat Brogan for granting me this interview and for providing feedback on the written version. www.catbrogan.com