By Gen Pearce (Year 10) & Ms Barnard

National Poetry Day is an annual celebration of the joy and discovery that comes with studying poetry. At NHEHS we always run a creative writing poetry competition for the KS3 classes, and the standard of entry for 2020 was particularly high. This year the theme was ‘Vision’ and our students interpreted this in a myriad of different ways. Congratulations to Ife, who has become the first Year 7 to win the whole competition. 

In addition to our own creative output we were incredibly lucky to welcome the renowned Performance Poet Sophia Thakur. Sophia had already dazzled our Ealing Teen Reading group last year, and she did not disappoint in her inspiring assembly to our Year 9s. Mixing heartfelt anecdotes about her own life and experiences with moving and powerful performances from her collection Somebody give this Heart a Pen, Sophia’s message of resilience and seeing yourself for who you truly are – rather than simply through the prism of how others might view you – was a welcome one.  Year 9 were simply spellbound and many of whom are now very keen to study Sophia’s work as part of their English Reading Passport Project. 

After her assembly, Sophia conducted two creative-writing workshops with two of our Year 10 groups. Genevieve describes what this entailed and its impact…

‘Sophia Thakur, an award-winning poet, visited NHEHS to celebrate National Poetry Day. This renowned writer and performance poet gave two Year 10 classes a fresh perspective on how to view themselves, especially in terms of the pressures placed upon younger generations due to the presence of social media. 

At the start of the session, we raised our hands if we applied certain adjectives to ourselves. For words such as ‘pretty’, ‘smart’ or ‘funny’, there was only a smattering of people who agreed that this described them. However, when we repeated this activity about our friends, the opposite occurred. This activity confirmed the notion that we tended to see ourselves through a tinted, negative lens. 

After a further discussion and a beautiful performance of one of her poems from her anthology Somebody Give This Heart a Pen, we wrote a poem to our partner. This brought forth high emotions as it was incredibly heartening to hear someone you value speak about you in such a positive manner. Reflecting on this, we wrote a letter to ourselves along the theme of Sophia Thakur’s own poem Baby Girl. This workshop was an incredible experience and was enjoyed immensely by all.’