You may have heard that Ofqual, the exams watchdog, has axed poetry as an integral component of the English GCSE syllabus next year to compensate for lost school time. And they could be funny: you had to love Daljit Nagra for rhyming ‘chutney’ with ‘Putney’ in ‘Singh Song!’ But I would have taken the complex cast and sweeping drama of Great Expectations over Carol Ann Duffy’s onion any day. Yes, they could be memorable: even now, I can recite Vernon Scannell’s ‘Nettles’, with its artfully simple cadences, by heart. I was a novels person, I thought - poems were too brief to affect me deeply or really sear themselves onto my psyche. Still sporting K-Swiss trainers and a swooping Justin Bieber fringe long after it was a good look (if ever it was), I was stuck in my old ways. In fact, as a teenager studying for my GCSEs, I believed it myself. ‘I don’t get poetry.’ It’s a miserable cliché, but generation after generation takes it to heart. Books That Changed My Life: Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes
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