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The first school I went to was a red-brick building on the edge of the town, in the district of Georgetown. We had a splendid teacher and he taught us, about sixty small boys, for the four years I was in the school, between the ages of seven and eleven. He was not only fond of words himself, but he could use them to tell jokes, to sing aloud, to explain things so vividly to us that we could see, almost, what he described. And he educated our senses, too, he made us look at everything so firmly, to know the textures of things with our skins, to hear the particular noises that exist in the world all around us. So real were our experiences that we began to look for the words necessary to recreate those experiences. That is how I began to write poetry.
I can’t say that poetry was my greatest enthusiasm at that time. I loved football most of all, and after that boxing. I would travel miles just to kick a football. I knew all the great boxers of our town. When I was about ten years old I saw the fight I wrote about in The Ballad of Billy Rose. And years later, in Bristol, I saw the same man, old now, and very frail. His name, however, was really Tommy Rose, and in the first version of my poem I called him that. When I finished it, I read it aloud, and I knew that something was wrong. I was forced to change it to Billy, so that the balance was right, so that there was a satisfying correspondence between the word "ballad" and the word "Billy". Much the same thing happened when I wrote about his last great fight. I wanted my readers to hear for themselves the sounds of the fight, and how the words which end in "s" are really the shoes of the boxers as they slither on the resin. What I’m saying is that in my poems I try not so much to describe things as actually to make them, with words.
My friend Ted Walker, a very fine poet himself, and I, used to set each other weekly poetry writing challenges, he choosing a title one week and I the next. In this way I came to write Gardening Gloves. The poem is an example of how necessary it is for the poet to observe well, so that an old pair of gloves can reveal all that there is to know about them, and for imagination to begin to build a little world around them.
Poetry is a craft as well as an art. We owe very great responsibility to the poems if we do not write well enough the poem fails. Like any other craft, although some people are more naturally gifted than others, we can all learn the skills. I learned by reading the work of other poets. I read everything, good poems, bad poems, learning as I read. I was very fond of funny poems, and that was valuable for me since, to be successful, funny poems have to be extremely well made. But as I grew more experienced and severe, as my taste developed, I needed better examples. I found them in the work of Edward Thomas, a poet who was killed in the First World War. From him l learned how to write quietly and simply, without, I hope, losing any strength or true complexity of thought I might possess. A Glass Window is in part my tribute to this man, dead years before I was born, who, among many others, taught me what poetry can be, how to listen to it. How to write it.
One of the strengths of the author’s teacher was that he taught his pupils to ______.