English study at Wellington: A love of poetry

Our young poets from across the school are entering into a poetry slam this year. These can be international contests where audience members grade, mark, and rank poems. They require poets to think about world issues, use poetic rhetoric and recite poems using imaginative diction. But, most of all, poetry slams are all about enjoying and listening to poetry from around the world.  

As an international school, we have pupils with experiences from worldwide. In their poems, they will explore and reflect upon their worlds and begin to compare their world to other people’s. This year’s theme is: ‘Out of this World’. It has led pupils to think about other people’s livelihoods, mythical characters, monsters, and thinking about science and space. The joy of this topic is that whatever pupils’ knowledge, background, or interests are, they will all be able to write and explore this theme through language.

Highlights from the Poetry Slam

Edgar Allen Poe, a famous English author, once stated that ‘poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.’ Our learners at Wellington College International Hangzhou have this love of language; they are always keen to explore and play with words, and poetry is the perfect medium for all learners to do this. It is not confined by grammatical rules (as important as they are to know) and can allow an interchange to happen naturally between a pupil’s home language and the languages spoken in school. Poetry can enable pupils to feel unconstrained by formal syntaxes and explore and learn new ways of expressing themselves. These last few weeks especially, we have been able to explore a plethora of different words, and pupils have jumped into finding the very best words to express what they feel or think. The true power of poetry is allowing someone absolute freedom of expression.

We were incredibly fortunate to include Harry Baker, a poetry slam world champion, in our work leading up to our poetry slam event. He spoke with our senior and upper-primary pupils about the relevance of poetry and how it has shaped his life. He talked about how even studying mathematics at the University of Exeter still led him down a creative arts pathway and how he now performs worldwide to various audiences writing songs and poems. Our pupils had a lot to ask him and their questions were outstanding. Further to this, Professor Debra Myhill from the University of Exeter, the director for research in writing and a professor of education, has spoken with our senior pupils. It has been highly beneficial as she has been able to talk through writing processes with our pupils, giving them an excellent foundation for their poetry. Both Harry Baker and Dr. Debra Myhill will be working with us to judge our poetry slam champions. We are already looking forward to seeing what our young poets can create.