Baytree Project: Poet Laila Sumpton Reflects

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“…the girls really connected with their emotions in a brave and honest way.”

Another summer term over, and our second poetry programme is all finished. We ended our 12 weeks with a wonderful celebration with performances from our young poets. We are so proud of all they acheived this term and we were so grateful to work with them.

Here’s what one of our facilitators for this term, poet Laila Sumpton had to say:

Over this term the girls have explored numerous forms of poetry including writing through our senses, haikus, rhyming couplets, responding to pictures (the gloriously named technique of ekphrastic writing!), recipe poems, boast poems and more. It was wonderful to see the writers have fun with language – without the restraints of marking, perfect handwriting and correct grammar. We have some wonderfully surreal and absurd poems about forks, we have incredibly vivid poems about parks, family life and Brixton and the girls really connected with their emotions in a brave and honest way.

Sally Wood from Strongback Productions and I lead the sessions, starting of with games, moving into inspiration and writing exercises and ending with performances. We also had a poet Courtney Conrad returning to co-lead a performance workshop and encourage the writers ahead of their performance day for centre staff and family members. The writers selected their favourite work – some of them having around 7 pages to sift through, and really got into the editing process – experimenting with changing the tense and speaker in the poem as well as hunting out any cliches or words that could do with an upgrade.

The writers learnt how to raise their voices, speak with passion and encouraged each other along the way. I hope they continue writing over the summer and beyond, lots of fabulous new writers to look out for in the future! Our sharing session was a wonderful celebration of their work and journey together and featured a group poem performance of piece dedicated to the wonderful space for women and girls that is the Baytree Centre in Brixton.

A Young Poet makes their final edits before performance, Summer 2024

With thanks to the London Community Foundation and the Baytree Centre.

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