The Red Room Company - Papercuts

Papercuts

Papercuts is The Red Room Company's poetry education program. It sends contemporary Australian poets into primary and secondary schools all across Australia.

Papercuts focuses on Australian poetry and its role in contemporary society. Created together with teachers, students and professionals in the education sector, the program's goal is to transform the way poetry is taught in schools.

Along with raising poetry's profile among young people, the project also aims to provide both creative and paid employment opportunities for contemporary poets.

Papercuts was launched in 2007 with support from the Keir Foundation and the Ian Potter Foundation, initially piloting in four NSW high schools. In 2008 it expanded into Victoria and in 2009-2010 moved further interstate to Norfolk Island and Queensland schools. Papercuts is now a national program, servicing schools everywhere in Australia.

In November 2010, KPMG hosted a Papercuts 'poetic excursion' to promote the program, during which small anthology was printed.

Papercuts is currently the only national poetry program available to high school students across Australia, designed to be a flexible unit of study that matches syllabus teaching and learning outcomes with the creative development and expression of students, through exposure to practising Australian poets. This exposure to contemporary poetic practise allows students to interrogate the process, as well as the end product, of their own and others' works. The importance and potential of poetry has been endorsed by students, teachers, poets, and education professionals, as well as by benefactors of the organisation.

• The Poetry Object

The Poetry Object is a free writing project for students in Years 3-10 attending NSW Public Schools in the Sydney Region, run as part of The Red Room Company's national poetry education program, Papercuts.

Young writers and their teachers submit poems and photographs about objects that are special to them. Special objects that inspired poems in 2011 included coffee machines, beloved pets and books, the Quran, cricket bats, musical instruments, jewellery and clothing, revealing the rich meanings that objects acquire.

Schools will also be able to submit photographs of their school-based display of their poems and photographs, which will be collected in an online gallery. In November 2012, an exhibition featuring posters of poems and photographs of special objects will be held at the State Library of New South Wales. Julian Morrow, from Radio National and ABC's The Chaser, along with Sydney poet Astrid Lorange, will serve as the Poetry Object judges for 2012.

As part of The Poetry Object, six Australian poets have been commissioned to write new poems about their own talismanic objects. Winner of the Thomas Sharpcott Prize, Nicholas Powell; performance poet and fellow Sharpcott Prize winner Rachael Briggs; Judith Wright Prize runner-up Sarah Jane Norman; 2011 City of Sydney Poet, Kate Middleton; Samantha Hogg, an exciting new voice in poetry; and the inimatable Robert Adamson will present new poems written specifically for The Poetry Object in November. Morrow stated in a press release that the competition allows children to improve their reading and writing skills by creating something that really matters to them:

“If the quality of The Poetry Object is anything to go by, and it sure is, programs like this are obviously a welcome opportunity for young people to express themselves, to appreciate poetry and to think about what matters to them,” says Morrow. “Hopefully it also gets them out of other, more boring classes.”

The Red Room Company’s Education Director, Tony Britten, also stated that poetry has a unique ability to engage young people with reading, writing and literature.

“Everyone has a poetry object,” says Britten. “The Poetry Object is special because it allows the students to become the experts. Only they can explain the significance of their object. The poems they write are young peoples’ way of telling us what’s genuinely important to them.”