A.F.Harrold is an award-winning poet and author, most recently shortlisted for the CLiPPA 2020 for Midnight Feasts: Tasty poems chosen by A.F. Harrold, illustrated by Katy Riddell. The judges, including 2019 CLiPPA winner poet Steven Camden (aka Spoken Word artist Polarbear) described Ashley’s book as ‘a delicious and quirky collection of poems old and new, skilfully curated and perfectly paced.’

I’ve been privileged to see Ashley performing poetry and running school workshops with children aged 7 and 8 – you’d be hard-pressed to say who enjoyed it more – the children or the adults in the room! His energy, humour and love for poetry is contagious. Read an extract from Midnight Poems:

I am absolutely thrilled to welcome Ashley to the blog today with a guest post about poetry and privacy and how we can use poetry to help deal with the things that trouble us. Welcome to the blog Ashley!

Poetry and Privacy – A.F. Harrold

“What I love, and have always loved, about poetry (and about all art, really) is that it’s none of your business.

What I mean is, when I read a book or a poem or listen to a piece of music or hear a joke, I am under no obligation to share it. I don’t have to tell anyone about it. Not about what I thought of it, or how it made me feel, or what it reminded me of, or what connections I traced from it to other pieces of art I’ve consumed before. I can keep all of that to myself.

Art is private, and one’s responses to art are private.

Sure, you might be the sort of person who loves sharing, in which case share away.

But for those of us who aren’t sharers, who don’t much care for the outside world, that feeling of ‘This-is-mine-ness’ of a book or a poem or a story overheard… that thing that happens in the solitary heart and the reader, the listener, is special. It’s a treasure, it’s something that belongs to us, a gem sparkling in the head of the toad of ourselves.

No one has the right to ask you what you think about this or that book or poem (or rather they have the right, but you have no duty to answer them). Keep it safe, keep it secret, if you want.

(You may not have much that belongs to you. You might have to share your toys, your bedroom, your bathwater. But this one thing, this treasure in your head, no one can take that away.)

And the same should go for making art.

You should feel free, whether you’re 8 or 80, to make poems, to do drawings, to write stories, to keep a diary, and to choose to keep them to yourself or share them with the world as you see fit.

Think of making poems as diary keeping.

Use them to find shapes for your thoughts and your fears, for the things that are happening in your life and in your family, with your friends or with strangers you saw in the shops… and sometimes just writing it down will be enough to still the fear, sometimes putting it away and looking back in a month or in six months and seeing how you’ve grown or changed or stayed the same as you-from-the-past might be helpful.

Writing something and knowing that no one else will see it, read it (until or unless you choose to share it), is a way of talking to yourself, to the future you, of checking in and taking stock. It has been essential to me, at times, and if you’re shy or solitary, like I am, then it might be something you should try.

But even if you don’t write, remember to read, that too is a good way to learn about yourself.”

Find out more about A.F Harrold at www.afharroldkids.com and the CLiPPA 2020 at www.clpe.org.uk