Richard Berengarten's Poetry Workshops

Between the mid-1970s and the late 1990s, RB regularly conducted poetry writing workshops for children and teenagers, university students, teachers, adults on evening and life-long learning courses, and pensioners in assisted accommodation. He developed many methods of his own, often involving mime and interactive games, especially for younger participants.

After working in schools in the wider Cambridge and London areas and in East and South East England, in the 1980s he began experimenting with bilingual workshops in Italy and former Yugoslavia, with the aid of local teachers as translators if and when needed. He would generate ideas, speaking in English, and participants would write poems in their own language. He worked in several republics of former Yugoslavia – mainly Serbia (where he lived between 1987 and 1990), and also Croatia, Macedonia and Slovenia. He also ran school-workshops in India (Chennai, then known as Madras) and the Czech Republic (Ústí-nad-Labem, working with Romany children), seminars for teachers in Poland, and lectures in Bulgaria.

The photo-sequence below shows a poetry-and-mime workshop in an English primary school in the 1990s, leading to the children making poems about hands.

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