GCSE

For GCSE students

Students often write to me with their interpretations of the poem, ‘Tissue’, and sometimes ask for answers that will help in the exams. It's good if you do have different interpretations. It shows your engagement as readers bringing your own experience to the poem. This is more important than anything I can say. I'm writing to you, not to give you answers, but to say: bring your own mind to the poem and that will open up the answers.

When I began writing Tissue I really didn’t know where the poem would go. I was just exploring the idea of what causes arguments and how to resolve them, and whether there was any way to avoid conflict that comes from political or religious differences, the things people fight over. 

In a way you can see that even the form of the poem is a kind of exploration, feeling its way through language, images and ideas.

The images in the poem began to appear quite naturally: the cause of conflict - political, national and religious certainties – were like solid unmoving structures, stone, brick and block, walls, borderlines, associated with pride and power. Somewhere in my mind I also had Shelley’s poem, 'Ozymandias', and its great image of ruined pomp, ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/ Stand in the desert’.

This was set against images of fragile tissue, the tissue page at the back of holy books; the scraps of paper like the ‘fine slips from grocery shops’, that we ignore or throw away maybe tell the real story of our lives; paper used in kites, an image of happiness. 

Then there are images of light shining through, literally breaking through barriers and maps and borderlines. Light, hope, goodness. 

A conservationist once told me that every time you touch a piece of paper you are changing it. Often paper gets thinner the more it has been touched. So in the poem I speak about

‘pages smoothed and stroked and turned
transparent with attention’.

The word transparent, suggests something you can see through, something honest.

You smooth and stroke something you are paying attention to, maybe even something you love. That leads to the idea of fragile human tissue being worthy of attention and care. Think about a baby’s skin: have you ever seen a baby’s hand, with the sun shining right through the fingers?

All life is as fragile and as precious as this. In the last line of the poem, the tissue is ‘turned into your skin’. I am saying this isn’t some abstraction, this is about you. When we pay attention to each other, it’s like paying respect, and if we respect human life we might not be so quick to throw it away in times of conflict. 

Writing a poem is a way of paying close attention too, maybe another way to let the light break through the ‘brick and block’, the artificial barriers we create between each another.

Listen to the sounds the poem makes. Before I ever send a poem to be published, I always read it aloud to make sure it has music. By that I don’t mean it has to rhyme, there are hardly any rhymes at the end of lines in 'Tissue', but there are sounds that echo and drop through the middle of the poem, like drift, shift, make, break. Also listen for times when the consonants are hard, Brick and block. 

I must say again that whatever I say is less important than what you think and what you bring to the poem.

Best wishes to you,  and good luck with the exams. I hope you keep your interest in poetry, whatever career you may choose in the future.

Imtiaz