There really is something rather extraordinary going on when you give a young writer permission to write a poem. Not because every child is going to become a poet, and not because poetry is a particularly efficient way of demonstrating that a child has learned a set of literary techniques. Certainly not because the resulting poem has to be good.

It is tempting, particularly when we’re talking about children and education, to begin with what poetry is good for. It improves literacy. It develops vocabulary. It encourages creativity and self-expression. It builds confidence. There is research to support some of these claims, including recent research from the National Literacy Trust suggesting that children who write poetry are more likely to enjoy writing generally, to write in their free time and to think of themselves as good writers.

All of that is worthwhile. But I tend to think it describes only a small part of what is happening. For me, before poetry is actually a form of writing, it is a way of paying attention. A way of noticing (and of feeling) something so profoundly, and so distinctively, that you cannot pass it by without spending a good deal of time in that experience. Only later does a poem become a means of shaping this experience into words.

And perhaps this is one of the reasons I find children’s poetry so interesting to facilitate as well as to read. A poem can bring a reader into a moment of attention: into a distinctively rich, sensory, and textured experience that another person has gathered into words and invited us to enter. There is something very special about the ways we inhabit poetry, both when we’re writing and when we’re reading it. Something I find at times ungraspable in prose, and something I discover often most acutely when children are working, playing and experimenting with poetry.

This is part of what informs my own practice, and it was very much at the heart of some of the poetry workshops I ran earlier this year. The aim was never to produce a particular kind of poem, or even necessarily to produce a finished poem at all. It was to make space for the kind of attention from which poetry can emerge.

Some of the poems that follow were written by children and teens who took part in those workshops. Others came to us through the magazine’s open submissions. Together, they offer a chance to see some of these different encounters with language at work. Rather than simply telling you what I think poetry can do, I want to look closely at what these young writers are actually doing: what they have noticed, where they have lingered, the choices they have made with words, and what becomes possible when they follow an experience far enough for it to begin to take shape as poetry.