"SO, do apples usually have pieces of paper sticking out of them?" "Yeah," said one boy, replacing his sticky name badge, that it no longer obscured the logo on his tracksuit top. "Well," said the woman leading the child's latest encounter with poetry, pointedly not missing a beat, "don't they usually have twigs or leaves sticking out of them?"
If there are indeed any wrong answers, the current poetry season at the Ark is not the place to find them. For here, in the pioneering children's cultural centre in Dublin's Temple Bar, among the zippy, tolerant, primary colours and soulful wood and concrete decor, we are in the heartland of the equally valid response.
The Ark's Poetry Season is about as far as a child can get from a traditional talk and chalk lesson without plugging into the mains. Indeed, it seems to be about using a pointedly no-tech approach, while at the same time avoiding the sin of dullness.
For Dolores O'Donnell, the programmer for the festival, the 10-day event may have benefits, not only for the children who will come to the Ark during that time, but in the longer term, for the way poetry is being approached in the education system. "I'm a teacher myself, so I know the difficulties of teaching poetry. It's all right if the teacher feels they have a special sympathy with the subject but, when they don't, it can be very difficult," says O'Donnell.
"Sometimes it's a case of `oh, bit's Easter; have I an Easter poem?' Without being condescending to teachers, poetry is something that requires a little bit of thought and a little bit of time and maybe children don't always get that. It's a difficult thing to teach. We're very conscious here that we're trying something out. I look on the ways we're approaching bringing children and poetry together here as an experiment. We are hoping to promote a little bit of thinking, a little bit of reflection."
The core of the Poetry Season is formed, interestingly, not by poems at all but by sculptures. ,Throughout the building, the Ark staff have positioned a number of "sculptural "po-e-trees". Built by artists, Genevieve Murphy and John Kelly, the Faraway Tree, the Heaney Tree, the Anon Tree, the Nonsense Tree, the Irish tree (called simply Crann) and the Telepoems Tree (an oddly crucifix-like telegraph pole from which hang the 100 winning poems from a competition to which 44,000 entries were submitted) - are the sort of uber-papier-mache and paint creations that everybody must have at one time felt they were on their way to making but never were. Standing together they form a little supervarnished copse, as instantly seductive and intriguing to an adult as to any child.
At a session on Tuesday, O'Donnell and the Ark's Director, Martin Drury, took charge of the first school group to take a walk along what has been dubbed "The Poetry Trail".
The morning begins with an introduction to the tree that stands imperiously in the centre of the poetry wood. The trunk of the Heaney Tree is an immense antique fountain pen, balanced on its end. From its nib spout clouds of deep blue ink, which are frozen in mid-air to form the leaves on which a selection of Heaney poems have been printed.
AFTER some encouragement, a small girl begins to make her way around the tree to see if she can find anything that suggests the ownership of the pen. When she comes across a signature on the pen's clip, she begins to sound it out; "Sha... muss... Han... eey". Heaney is, Drury tells his audience, a famous Irish poet, who has written poems about childhood and about his relationship with his mother and his father and his younger brother and all sorts of other poems.
Older children who visit the Ark during the season will have a more extended encounter with the Heaney Tree but for this group of first-class students it is on to the Anon Tree. Seamus, Drury observes later, is not famous everywhere.
Engagement with the other trees, all also bearing poems in various guises, is more developed. With Drury and O'Donnell leading, the children find: Irish language poems (they are the ones piercing the golden apple of Crann, a woolly shrub with a trunk of medieval gargoyles); nonsense poetry, written backwards on a tree of elephantine flowers; verses about travel on the mammoth antique globe tree and, on a mysterious cloud-like form, a selection of anonymous verses.
As well as a wander through the poetry woods, the Poetry Season is also offering a series of flesh and blood encounters which promise to deliver equally angular approaches to poetry. The actor Barry McGovern will be squeezing in a reading of his children's favourite verses on Saturday before heading up O'Connell Street to perform in Waiting for Godot at the Gate. Poet Gabriel Fitzmaurice will deal with poetry in Irish, while Paula Meehan, the Black Glaswegian poet Jackie Kay and Matthew Sweeney will all give readings and lead workshops.
Donegal-born, but London-based since the 1970s, Sweeney regularly goes into school groups, giving readings and working with children on their own poems. He writes odd, intelligent verse, full of unscheduled detours to places like Rio and Rangoon, and scrupulously poised plain speaking. Sweeney's is, in short, the sort of verse that gets published by Faber and Faber. Fatso in the Red Suit, his poem about a young child's approach to his parents' faltering relationship begins: It was October and already the fake Santa's were filling the grottos in the big stores...
The collection to which this poem lends its title certainly contains pieces closer to pure entertainment but Sweeney is insistent about not underrating the intelligence that children of various ages will bring to the poems. He quotes W. H. Auden as saying: "There are no good poems just for children, although some poems presuppose adult experience in their readers." "I think that's the bottom line," says Sweeney, "there's a lot of crap published for children, an awful lot of patronising crap. Any good poem for kids should be another poem for adults; they should have that dual existence.
Sweeney sees what he describes as the Ark's "buzzy" approach to poetry as essential. "Robert Frost called poetry `a fresh look and a fresh listen' and poetry has to be introduced to children, especially older children, as exactly that. Making poetry fun does not mean cheapening it."
"This is not supposed to be an elaborate marketing exercise to build the readers of the future, or indeed the arts public of the future," says Drury, as he takes a moment's break between sessions. "The consumer world is forever trying to rush children on, rushing them on from being eight to being nine, from nine to being to, rushing them to change themselves. I recognise that work like this may also lead to a more developed public but our primary responsibility is to the children who come through the door. I'm determined that the work we do in here will be about the `presentness' of being seven or being eight or being nine."
