Are You A Risk-Taker?

In my younger years I was a very risk averse person. During the 80s and 90s, although I wrote and performed my poetry in schools and West End comedy clubs, I did it as a hobby and would never have considered giving up my well-paid and secure council PR job for it. I had a young family and a mortgage and it just wasn't in my nature to make such a risky career move.

But then I ran a poetry workshop for fun during a council 'learn at work' day and, after receiving fantastic feedback, I decided that evening that my future was as a professional poet running poetry writing and performance workshops. Fortunately my wife was incredibly supportive and May 2005 I 'jumped ship' to start my new life.

It was scary. Sometimes gut-churningly scary. What if I failed? What if I couldn't pay the mortgage? What if there was no way back to my old job should things not work out? Would I let down my family? But I soon noticed I actually THRIVED on uncertainty. It was an adrenalin rush like I had never felt before. I was a free agent, excited about the responsibility of being my own boss, full of NEW ideas and surprisingly enjoying the insecurity of what the future might deliver. It was so unlike me yet I took a huge RISK, and I was loving it.

18 years of workshops and performances and 12 books later, things have thnakfully worked out or I wouldn't be writing this blog. My point is this though: I now encourage my students and children who I work with to do the same. RISK AVERSE THINKING NEVER CREATED WORTHWHILE ART of any sort be it poetry, music, dance, fine art etc. So here are some of the things that I do to encourage risk in my workshops:

No child is ever allowed a rubber. Children with them won't experiment, will erase 'half ideas' before they have the chance to fully form them and try and create the perfect poem at the first time of asking. I can't even do that!

Ditto for dictionaries and thesauruses - great tools but misused or overused more often than not. And nobody is allowed to ask how to spell a word in my classes (“just sound it out for now – check it only when it’s being written up in ‘best’, after I have gone”).

I show children that 'messy is good' by holding up pages from my ever so scribbly notebook (SEE PIC) in which I write all my poems. They gasp at the state of it but I tell them every mess they see is now a published poem in one of my books or on my website.

I reassure them by adding that if they end my session with a creative poem using wonderful words and imagery, even if half-completed and extremely messy, that's absolutely fine while a three-page perfect looking poem probably isn't. Presentation can be sorted without my help/once I've gone - it IS important but very secondary.
If you must ‘model’ keep it to an absolute minimum. Any modelling reduces risk as children of all ability levels will want to copy what you’ve written and similar work is produced by most of the class.

Interestingly it's (a few of) the most able children that find my guidance harder to cope with and their work suffers as they can't break free of their existing 'truths'. Conversely the other children find it liberating and 'fly'.

I also take risks by constantly updating and trying new workshop ideas, styles of poems and different techniques and tips for participants. Sometimes I'll be a bit anxious about this – what if the new things don't work out? But 99% of the time they do with fantastic results, and when they don't I'll modify the new ideas and try again to crack it.

So RISK IS INSPIRING, enjoyable and helps us GROW in very many ways! Embrace it and let those you teach do the same.

Finally, please read my poem ‘Delaying Tactics’ on this very topic as it sums up much of the above and more. I often perform it to classes before running a workshop.

What are your views on the issues in this blog? Please share them below.

NZ, updated Aug 2023