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sudoku, can be done in seconds”, or do you find one that says super fiendish difficult? You<br />
don't chose the first one because you want a challenge. People chose poetry they say, is it<br />
accessible poetry? Oh I don't know about any of that fancy poetry that doesn't say<br />
anything. And you say, why don't you treat a poem the way you treat a sudoku, that you<br />
want a challenge?<br />
OV: do you think that we – in general -, are not equipped by schools, the way poetry is<br />
taught in schools, equipped to treat it as a 'whole thing'. I always found that when we<br />
were taught poetry, it was line by line, what's this line saying what technique are they<br />
using, etc.<br />
JB: I think it can be quite useful to do that kind of close reading, of any text. I think we<br />
should teach close reading of Orwell's essays, or the newspaper. What I think schools<br />
should do – and it's the one thing they don't do, and they're paid not to do – is to teach<br />
every child how to do critical thinking, whatever they're looking at. Whether reading a<br />
report in the Guardian, reading a new poem by Mark Doty, or looking at a picture, or<br />
looking at a photograph. Watching a movie. Looking at green-washing in an airport. What<br />
our schools should be doing is creating, educating, creating a basis for people to live as<br />
citizens, and that is to teach you how to do critical thinking, and how to enjoy it, and to<br />
give them the sense that they are free to do think critically. And that would apply to a<br />
poem, and if you had a really genuine critical thinking society, everything would carry a<br />
poem in it the way every newspaper carries a – well, not everything does now -, but<br />
everything carries a sudoku or a puzzle of something. There might be a poem in it. And the<br />
poem might be very straight forward, or it might be something more complex and difficult<br />
to understand.<br />
OV: it's only now a handful of newspapers that – Morning Star – that carries a poem<br />
JB: but it's probably one of those very obvious, accessible poems isn't it? I used to write a<br />
poem, I had great fun writing a poem every Sunday for a while, not for very long, and it<br />
had to be for sport. In the sport pages. And that was a very enlightened editor, so many<br />
pages of sport writing to run. And said it was worth having space for a poem there. So<br />
he'd call me up and say, could you write a poem about a sporting event that happened in<br />
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