Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3: How to use verbs
AKALA:'Words are powerful, words are strong, but what happens when the words run out? What happens when we can't find a way to express our feelings of anger, of love, or of confusion?' What happens when communication breaks down? We often end up with silence. 'But unfortunately sometimes, we end up with conflict鈥'
AKALA:'and violence.'
CIARAN CARSON:Suddenly, as the riot squad moved in 'it was raining exclamation marks, nuts, bolts, nails, car keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion itself - an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated line, a burst of rapid fire鈥 I was trying to complete a sentence in my head, but it kept stuttering.
CIARAN CARSON:'All the alleyways and side streets blocked with stops and colons. The poem is set in august 1969 at which time there was a certain amount of riots in Belfast. There has been a long standing conflict in the north of Ireland about who is in charge and there's always conflict between those sides.'
AKALA:Belfast Confetti.
CIARAN CARSON:Well, it's an interesting title. The word confetti is usually used as you know
CIARAN CARSON:It's about celebration. It's about weddings It's about joy. It's about fun. Also it's light and it's not heavy. And Belfast is used with a certain amount of black humour
AKALA:Throughout the poem there's this use of grammar
CIARAN CARSON:Yeah.
AKALA:And grammar seems to symbolise this confetti also, this chaos.
CIARAN CARSON:Under stress, your sense of how to use language or who you are, and where you're going, it gets kinda confused.
ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU:He interprets this chaos through grammar, right?
ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU:And it's that kind of attachment of grammar becoming a very symbolic element for chaos like, the hyphen is not just a hyphen anymore and the exclamation mark is very, bang.
SOPHIA THAKUR:There's too many breaks, there's too many sudden things happening
SOPHIA THAKUR:and because of that, there's like this war in his mind.
ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU:So they're actually like little weapons and it's very harsh, kind of metallic images that he's putting in your head.
CIARAN CARSON:I know this labyrinth so well - 'Balaclava, Raglan, Inkerman, Odessa Street - Why can't I escape? Every move is punctuated. Crimea street. Dead end again.' As a child I didn't know anything about the war or anything. I'm a kid you know? And then I read afterwards that in Belfast, the streets where you lived are called after鈥 wars.
CIARAN CARSON:Imperial wars. And it struck me as an irony of some kind. Balaclava, Raglan, Inkerman, Odessa. And there was one street name actually I don鈥檛 have in the poem which I'm sorry I haven't got and it was Sevastopol Street Sevastopol. Ominous. 'A Saracen, Kremlin-2 mesh. 'Makrolon Face-shields.'
CIARAN CARSON:Walkie-talkies.
AKALA:So the poem is, at least the way I've read it is, the lines are broken up and there's a kind of brutal鈥 kind of little end pieces on the next line
CIARAN CARSON:To me it's like a skewed sonnet. It's a long established form that's been handed down for hundreds of years, as a conventional, set, sort of, form. And I think I had in mind to have that skewed, extend the lines on it, screw it up a bit, you know?
AKALA:Skew the sonnet.
CIARAN CARSON:Yeah skew the sonnet baby, that's what we're at.
ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU:The poet hasn't written it in a linear form it's kind of very erratic in its layout which again is symbolising or pushing you to think of chaos, yeah, or of a war.
CIARAN CARSON:What is my name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question-marks. I'm involved in language because it helps you to gain an acrid understanding of the world and how it works but that acricy has to also apply to the ambiguity鈥
AKALA:Right.
CIARAN CARSON:of your identity and how you stand in the world. And the uncertainty about your life and where you're going, where you're coming from, 'who are you anyway?' So that it all comes down to a matter of identity, I think.
AKALA:'Ciaran Carson's questions are left unanswered. Perhaps violence doesn't just destroy people's lives perhaps it destroys language and communication too. Does that mean that the poem ends in silence that words have run out?' Not if we start to think and talk about the ideas and questions in Belfast Confetti.
CIARAN CARSON:'Where am I coming from? Where am I going?' A fusillade of question-marks.'
Hip-hop star Akala explores the poem 'Belfast Confetti' with its author Ciaran Carson.
They discuss how the poem uses language to express the poet鈥檚 experience of conflict and identity during the Troubles.
Young poets break down the language of the poem, while Akala investigates the historical backdrop of the text and what it can tell us about the present.
This clip is from the series Poetry: Between the Lines.
Teacher Notes
_Teacher viewing recommended prior to use in the classroom
After watching the clip, you could discuss with your class how the poet presents the effects of conflict in Belfast Confetti.
You could look at how the form of the poem shows how life has become chaotic.
You could examine the use of metaphor and verbal imagery, discussing how it is both strange and confusing, for example the lists of hard, ugly objects and reference to street names.
It can be used to explore the theme of conflict in poetry, to illustrate the poetic work of Ciaran Carson and to teach analysis of poetic technique and form and to explore the historical backdrop of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
It can be used to encourage fluency with critical terminology and language, to highlight context and biography in literature, to encourage students to develop their own interpretations of poems they have read and to encourage viewers to explore and develop their own taste in poetry.
Curriculum Notes
This clip will be relevant for teaching English Literature.
This topic appears in OCR, Edexcel, AQA, WJEC KS4/GCSE in England and Wales, CCEA GCSE in Northern Ireland and SQA National 4/5 in Scotland.