SCHOOL DAYS: Puberty, puppets and poets

by Elaine Fishwick

"It’s the coolest job being a poet," said Sam Wagan Watson. "I get to sit around all day in my pyjamas, with Foxtel on the TV, writing." Wagan, from Queensland, and fellow poets Peter Skrzynecki from Sydney and Adrian Mitchell from the UK, did a good promo for life as a poet with their verses about three-legged dogs, love, childhood memories, war, puppies and puberty.

Watson , Skrzynecki and Mitchell read extracts from their poems to a packed audience at the Meet the Poets session of School Days on Tuesday.

Mitchell said that by two and a half, he’d produced the immortal lines "Molly and Polly get your dolly" and "Berty and Gerty don’t be dirty". By nine he’d written a play called Animal Brains Trust. It made his schoolmates laugh and he was hooked on writing forever. Watson said he “became a writer by accident because I couldn’t think of anything better to do". Skrzynecki’s love of words came through helping his German mother with English.

Watson read hauntingly about the infiltration of the ordinary days of his childhood by the spirit people of his ancestors. Skrzynecki told of his search for identity in a migrant camp in Parkes, and in the western suburbs of Sydney after moving here with his family in 1949.

Mitchell sang a poem about kids being bullied at school. But it was his "A puppy called puberty" - about the trials, tribulations and pleasures of “keeping puberty like a puppy in your underpants” - that rocked the theatre with laughter.