We are delighted to welcome Patience Agbabi to the blog for an exciting interview and discussion around Poetry By Heart.  Patience was born in London in 1965 to Nigerian parents. She has been writing poetry for over twenty years, and is now writing for children too. The Infinite, the first in the Leap Cycle series, won a Wales Book of the Year Award and the series has an enthusiastic following amongst young readers. The third instalment, The Circle Breakers, is out now. Patience is also a judge on Poetry By Heart, the national poetry speaking competition for schools and colleges in England and in this interview explains why she recommends we all learn poetry by heart.

Could you describe your own first encounters with poetry – at home and at school? When did you first feel that poetry offered something special? Do you remember learning poems by heart?

My foster mum read to me every night as a young child so my earliest memory would be of hearing nursery rhymes and loving the sounds as well as the sense of them. Poetry at school came much later. It would have been early secondary and I remember loving the soundscapes again, as well as the shape it made on the page. I distinctly remember the teacher explaining iambic pentameter and understanding it instantly. I was lucky because quite a few of the pupils found it difficult – it seems to be the hardest technical device to grasp – and it actually opened up creative doors in my head. When we had to learn ‘The quality of mercy is not strained’ speech in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, I found it relatively easy because I was in tune with the iambic pentameter. I do think it’s important when learning a poem by heart that you get a choice. I was quite happy learning Shakespeare but I wasn’t your average kid.

You have always taken part in Spoken Word and live poetry performance – why is that so important to you and what do you see in audience responses?

I’m lucky to have had the gift of a very strong memory for learning poetry, even stronger when I’ve written it myself. I tend to write rhyming poetry which helps enormously with the mnemonics. My creative process involves revisiting lines over and over in order to generate subsequent lines. I hear them out loud in my head. That means by the time I get to the end of a poem, I know it. I could reproduce it on paper. Learning to deliver it fluently out loud takes a bit of rehearsal, much more as I get older! The spoken word and live poetry scene was very exciting for me. I feel privileged to have been living in London at the end of the last millennium as the scene was so vibrant, there was lots going on every week. I was initially inspired by hearing other poets perform. In the early days it was a mixture of African and Caribbean poets like Ahmed Sheikh, Merle Collins, Benjamin Zephaniah and Jean Binta Breeze. Then I also fell in love with the punk poetry of John Cooper Clarke, Joolz and Attila the Stockbroker. Then rap poets came on the scene. I could go on. I was inspired by them all and once I’d got over the crippling nerves, I loved the act of live performance, bouncing off the energy of the audience. In fact, I was less nervous performing off by heart because even though my voice was steady, my hand used to shake like crazy holding a piece of paper and I would find that distracting and worry the audience would be distracted too. Audiences always respond differently when someone is performing by heart. It seems more real; not having the pages there breaks down the barrier between poet and audience.

When did you first get involved with Poetry By Heart and why did you want to support the competition?

I was asked to judge the very first competition which was in 2013. I had to look up the date and I can’t believe it’s been around for a decade now. I instantly said yes because I think there’s something transformative about performing a poem out loud to a live audience. I liked that it asked young people to choose one poem pre-1900 and one post-1900. I’d always enjoyed poetry from previous eras but at the same time, loved contemporary poems. So I thought it would be a very good thing indeed to be involved in. I’ve judged quite a few written poetry competitions and I always find it excruciating to only be able to choose a few winners and runners up. There are always poems that don’t quite make it that are really good. But with Poetry By Heart, I know that every young person standing up on the stage is a winner. They will have gone through the process and had the chance to at least perform in front of their peers at school and if they were lucky and advanced further, a wider audience at the finals.

What do you most enjoy about being a judge for Poetry By Heart – could you describe the kind of performances you see and what the young people gain from the experience of performing at The Globe?

It is great to see young people take a poem by someone they’ve never met and make it their own. The best performances make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Since Covid, we’ve done the first stage of the judging from videos and that has worked surprisingly well. There is an intensity to the recordings, often done on mobile phones, that make you feel that person is performing directly for you. That said, it’s even better when I see the same poem on the big stage at the Globe. Then, the young people are performing in front of family and teachers and poet judges and the Poetry By Heart team; there is that communal buzz you can only get from live performance. The Globe is particularly good as a venue because it is both formal enough – designed for Shakespeare – but it’s also informal because it has that Groundling space at the front. That makes it very accessible. Mind you, it has been pretty hot the past couple of years so that front space has been a bit empty, people seeking out the shade, but I look forward to seeing a crowd a bit close to the stage this year!

Would you recommend that everyone learns poetry by heart and why?

Definitely. Because it’s fun and gives you confidence and instils a deep love of language and literature. And it also enables a reaching out to community. People generally learn poems so they can share them. They might savour them on their own tongue and lips but there is also a pure joy in lighting up someone’s life with a poem. The key thing is, it must be a poem that’s been chosen, not imposed. When someone chooses a poem, they choose it because it speaks to them. Even the process of finding such a poem is like finding a jewel, a linguistic gem that must be celebrated. I also think there’s something infectious about learning poetry by heart. When you see other people doing it, as I did, all those years ago in my early 20s, I wanted to do it too.

Book 3 in The Leap Cycle series of books for young readers is just out – what do you enjoy most about writing for young people in particular? Does your background as a poet have an impact on your writing?

There’s a point early on in Book 1, The Infinite, when my heroine states, ‘I LOVE words, the shape and the sound of them and how they feel on my tongue.’ Part of the impetus for writing for young people was wanting to celebrate the voice of my heroine, Elle. All the books are written in her voice, a first-person narrative. I created a main protagonist who loves poetry, on the page and out loud. In the sequel, The Time-Thief, Elle has won a poetry competition and eventually reads her poem out loud at, wait for it, a poetry salon at Dr Johnson’s house in the year 1752. It’s a time-travel series so I was able to create that scene. In the latest book, The Circle Breakers, anonymous notes are written in rhyming couplets and there is a spoken word Battle of the Beats in one of the earlier chapters. I’m currently working on the finale, Book 4, which includes scenes in a library called The Four Quartets. My poetry background totally fed the entire series. I could not have written it if I didn’t have a deep passion for poetry, both on the page but also out loud. Young people love hearing books read aloud. I’ve had a lot of feedback from teachers who have enjoyed reading The Leap Cycle books to their Year 5 and 6 classes. It feels like things have come full circle; my love of words came from hearing them being read aloud by my mum. Now I’m writing books for young people. Hopefully I’m inspiring some writers of the future.

The Circle Breakers is out now, published by Canongate, 9781838855796, £7.99, pbk and Poetry By Heart is open to all schools, primary and secondary, and colleges. To find out more visit the website or contact the team direct on info@poetrybyheart.org.uk or on 0117 905 5338.

Thank you to Patience for the interview and to Andrea Reece for the opportunity.