At Primary school on Wednesday afternoon we had this woman who would come in to take us for poetry followed by PE.

Her idea of poetry was to set a poem for us to learn rote for the following week. She used to like Tennyson and Wordsworth, I remember.

The lesson would involve her selecting victims. They were called on to stand up in turn and recite the verse from memory. You sat there anxiously waiting to see if you were going to be called on. When you recited your verse you were expected to be word-perfect. If you stumbled you received a glare. If you got too many words wrong or couldn’t remember the verse you were made to stay in while the others went out to do PE.

I loved PE. I spent many an afternoon with a poetry book propped in front of me peering out the window at the rest of the class outside enjoying themselves. Each week there was a panic as I tried to memorise some long Victorian ode. Fortunately I had a good memory and managed to get away with it a lot of the time. It didn’t endear me to the verse though.

My early experience was one of anxiety and frustrated resentment. I grew to hate poetry. There wasn’t any appreciation or love of the subject. Poetry was dead.

That was reinforced in secondary school. Here the poetry wasn’t appreciated for its beauty or content but analysed and pulled to pieces for examinations. It was a process that killed poetry. I grew to regard poetry as being written by dead people and the ultimate in boredom.

Then, when I was fourteen, Dylan appeared on the scene. I didn’t associate the words with poetry – they were lyrics – but they spoke to me. For the first time I was appreciating poetry without even realising.

Then there was Ginsberg – when I was sixteen I read ‘Howl’ and for the first time I realised that poetry could actually speak to somebody like me. It was speaking my language; it was alive; it screamed about the society we lived in with all its boring nonsense and shouted about a new type of quest with meaning – a way of living that made sense – that engaged with the big questions in life. I wanted those blasts of life – the jazz – the clubs – the madness – the wildness – the search for answers – the craziness – the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. It stood for everything I was for and starkly spelt it out. That was how I wanted to live. I wanted to live! I wanted truth! I wanted to crawl down those streets at dawn with flaming eyes having lived!

Through Ginsberg I rediscovered poetry and unlocked all the gems of Frost, Owen, Mitchell, Kerouac, Keats, Yeats, Blake and the rest.

They’d opened my eyes and enriched my life. Thanks Bob and Allen.