‘It’s good to be me.’ – A poet’s trip to Malaysia –

I was so fortunate to be contacted by the Garden International School in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, about having me in for a weeks work of poetry performances, workshops and boxercise sessions.
Two weeks after agreeing dates, the flights were booked and I headed off on my 23 hour journey to the other side of the world to do what I love for a living.

I landed on the Sunday and was up for work at 5.30am Monday morning. Of course, jet-lagged and tired I still couldn’t wait to get the week underway!

So Monday started with two, one hour performances with year 9 & 6 and then finished the rest of the day by helping the year 6 students write their own poetry in preparation for their poetry slam on Wednesday.

Working with just under 300 students on the first day alone, I was buzzing for the rest of the week.

My second of five working days in Kuala Lumpur began with 3×1 hour poetry workshops with year 6 and finished with a 2 hour boxercise session with the teachers!!!

They were some big lumps… now I know why the students are so well behaved.

The year 6’s were writing around the theme of ‘It’s good to be me’ and one group decided to get all street and ghetto with their poetry/rap chorus; …
‘Mic check, one, two, three
Yo, yo, it’s good to be me!’

Tomorrow they’ll be performing their poems in front of the whole year group as part of the poetry slam!

Year 7 were my visitors for Wednesday mornings assembly. Performing & freestyling for them along with answering any questions that they had.
I asked 10 students to think of 10 words that they thought I couldn’t rhyme with so that I could attempt to perform a freestyle poem, on the spot, rhyming (or half rhyming) with the words that they had given me. They came up with;
Hypothermia
Orange
Rhythm
Onomatopoeia
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
Dolphin
Hyperbole
Music
Exit &
Grotesque.

Thankfully I managed to see the poem through to the end and the freestyle lines looked a little something like this…

I think it’s fair to say that they were impressed.

The day concluded with the year 6 poetry slam final with each of the winning participants receiving the Birmingham Young Poets Laureate book – ‘My dream.’

All 14 teams were amazing and they wrote, practised and performed their poems in a very short space of time.

The winning performance can be found here…

Thursday was a national holiday in KL so I got the chance to check out the sights and hit the town.

Friday, my final day, produced a last session selfie after 4×1 hour performances to end my week in Kuala Lumpur.

I was sad to be leaving but I had an amazing day to top off a fantastic week.

One of the students even said to the head of English – ‘Sir, he’s the best speaker that we’ve ever had.’ …
Which was just ❤.

Hopefully I’ll be back again in the future but for now, thank you Garden International for inviting me to your school! Xx

A HUGE thank you must also go to Miss Siobhan, the school librarian, for looking after me all week and ensuring that my transition from class to class was smooth and easy.

It was a pleasure to meet her, as well as the rest of the staff, and I’d like to think that I’ll be back over there again in the future. X. #PoetWithPunch