Poetry As Revision - Year 10 (introduction)

In many ways, poetry is the purest form of revision.

Taken literally, re-vision means 'to see something again', which is, in many ways what the poet is trying to do at all times... to see something again, be it a lost love, a view from a bridge, the innocence of childhood or any of the infinite experiences that make up our lives.

There is also the sense of 'revision' which refers to changing something (eg. 'the revised version of the text'). This too is surely one of the concerns of the poet, who can not help but present you with a 'revised version' of their experiences. When Scannell hacked at the nettles in his garden, surely he did not think for a second that he was genuinely cutting away at 'raw recruits'... but given time and consideration, the memory was 'revised', altered, filtered through the poet's memories of WWII. And when he was ready to put pen to paper, Scannell offers us a 'revised version' of a memory.

The most common use of the word 'revision'... at least in schools... would perhaps best be re-named 'revisiting'. The form of revision seen most commonly in schools is the 'note-taking', 'fact-storing', 'data-cramming' variety which allows us a greater chance of passing an exam by keeping all of the key information in our brains... at least until the exam is over. Funnily enough, it is for similar purposes that poetry became so popular.

In the oral tradition of poetry, long rhyming sequences were constructed as a way of holding a lengthy story or even an important piece of news in one's head whilst travelling from village to village. The spreading of information was once reliant, not on bandwidth or phone-signal, but on one's ability to construct effective rhymes with which to store information.

It is for this reason that one of the most effective ways to remember crucial information is to construct a poem out of it, tying it to a series of rhymes anchored in your mind. As you complete the task relating to the character of Portia in the earlier post, I want you to think about how much information about the character you can fit into a piece of rhymed verse in such a way that you will remember the key facts about this character.