What inspired a poetry collection all about play?
For me, poetry is play! My poems are just games that I play – games with words. I’ve come to writing poetry quite late in my life, but I’ve always loved puns, rhymes, jokes and riddles. On one old scrap of paper I found from when I was a kid, me and a mate had written out all of the characters from Star Wars, only we’d made them items of food. Flan Solo. C-3PeaO. That sort of thing.
Games are a way for me to have fun, but they’re also more than that. I’ve often found it hard to talk about big feelings or remember small details about my friends’ lives. But when I game, I feel this close connection with the people I’m playing with.
I think the poetry collection came from that impulse. From having lots (and I do have LOTS) of silly ideas, and wanting to write them down. From wanting to play. And from wanting to connect!
What is your favourite thing about poetry?
I love how every poem is its own thing. A little mini world that you get to explore and work out the rules for. When you write a poem, it’s like you get to reset all the rules of writing. It can go however you want it to go.
Do you have a favourite poem from the collection to perform and why?
I like to perform What If?, which is a poem about an imagination game. The game is very simple. You just take a ‘what if…?’, like ‘what if it just started raining baked beans’, and explore it. I always perform it when I visit schools and afterwards we all ask ‘what if?’ and there’s always a weird one that I have never heard before. Like ‘what if your bones were chocolate?’ ‘What if all the hats turned into socks?’ Stuff like that.
What do you hope children take away from these books?
I hope they come away thinking, ‘That was fun!’ And also, I hope they think, ‘I could do that!’ Because anyone can.
What would be your advice to students who don’t think poetry is for them, or teachers who struggle to get students to engage with poetry?
That’s a tough one. Maybe you could look for poetry in other things. You could look at hip-hop, or riddles, or not-too-rude limericks, or the lyrics of your favourite song, or the weird little catchphrases that members of your family always say (like my nan, who will look at a cloudy sky and say ‘well, as long as there’s enough blue to patch a sailor’s trousers.’ Which means that as long as you can see some blue between the clouds, it won’t be miserable weather.) There are lots of things that are really poetic without necessarily being poems.
What are your top tips for budding poets?
Have a look in the back of my book – there are loads and LOADS of poem ideas and games in there for you to explore. Play around with a few of them. And if you have any poetry games for me to play, let me know at samgayton.com!
