The first time I ended up in a classroom as an adult was almost accidental. It was the winter of 1972, I was 20 and home from university recuperating from an illness, wondering what I’d do with myself until the next academic year started and I could resume my studies.

My father, a headteacher in a village primary school, told me the nearest primary school along the peninsula needed a substitute infant teacher until the new appointee took up her post three months later. It was a very isolated school on the northern coast of Donegal, and I suppose it wasn’t easy to come up with a replacement at short notice, so despite my total lack of qualifications (beyond the fact that I’d done reasonably well at school) I got the job.

I walked in the first morning without having a clue what to do. I found a group of small children who were clearly frightened - not of me, I thought, but I resolved to approach the business in hand through play. Oh, we did reading and sums and so forth, and it was wonderful to witness new information and skills clicking into place day by day, but the emphasis was always on play.

I have one image from that pleasant time - myself and the children engaged in one of the compulsory weekly singing lessons. Being a non-singer, I had decided that we would do the same song every week, a rowdy rendition of “Fifteen Men on the Dead Man’s Chest”, and as term progressed we took to enacting the song, with one young ruffian cheerfully volunteering to play the dead man. So there we were one day, roaring out the song, with the whole class on top of the dead man, when the door opened and the inspector walked in. “Mr Sweeney”, he said, “What is going on here?”. “Singing lesson”, I replied. “I see”, he said, and went out again. I heard nothing more about it.

After leaving that lilliputian world, reluctantly, it was 12 years before I stepped into a classroom again. This time it was a bit different, a 6th form college in Surrey, where I’d just been appointed writer-in-residence, and once again I hadn’t a clue what I was going to do. I was to start in January, and spent much of December in a state of anxiety and panic. I also had a brief from the Arts Council, who were paying my stipend, that I wasn’t just to engage with students of English. I bumbled through the first couple of weeks (six months later two of my students came and told me how hopeless I’d been at the start but said I’d got much better) wondering how to do this.

Then, discovering one of my students played in a rock band, I asked him if the band had ever thought of playing a lunchtime gig at the college, and would they be prepared to share the stage for a short time with a poet reading his work aloud? He said they’d love to do it, so posters for the gig went up, and most of the students in the college packed into the hall. My spot came at the end of the concert, and I read five poems, all carefully chosen to show the students a world they knew, and I finished with a piece about a rock band starting up, on which I was accompanied by the band playing a moody, Velvet Underground type of music. It worked, to the extent that students came up to me afterwards, and my classes filled up with students right across the board.

I have another music-associated memory from that residency. It was summer, and I and a few of my students were invited to participate in an outdoor musical evening. We read some poems straight, and some accompanied by electric guitar, and afterwards as I was heading across the playing fields with a group of students towards the pub, I overheard one teacher saying to another “There goes the pied piper with his rats.”

This idea of the poet in education as an outsider has a lot of truth in it, and it is useful to be that outsider. It enables one to come at the children from an angle they’re not expecting, which in turn encourages them to try something different. Introducing an element of play or fun is part of this, the way I do it - serious play, which is how I’ve heard poetry defined. The American poet Robert Lowell said that “the poet must be an opportunist and use whatever comes to hand.” The poet as sporadic or eccentric teacher can benefit from this advice too.

I can recall two clear examples that illustrate this. Both happened in primary schools in London. The first was a Poets in Schools visit for the Poetry Society. As I approached the outbuilding where the class I was to work with was situated, I saw a crow strutting about on the grass. Inside the classroom I asked two of the children to go out and get the crow. I said it was a muse and would help them write poems. They didn’t budge, and we went on with the session, but at break time two boys came to the staffroom to ask for me, saying excitedly that a bird was in the classroom. “Is it the crow?” I asked, “No”, they said, “It’s a smaller bird.” “Good”, I said, “The crow has sent his ambassador. From now on the poems written will be wonderful.”

The second example occurred during a London Arts Board mini-residency in a school in central London, where I worked with the same groups of children all term. One day I found in my pocket a small handcarved, handpainted wooden man that had been given to me by a Polish artist in Bremen. I took him out and showed him to the children, saying he was called Blok and that I stuck him with bluetack to the top of my typewriter whenever I wrote. I said I’d brought him in to help them with their poems. They could each hold him for a period, then pass him on. At one stage a girl came up to me to complain that so-and-so had been holding Blok for ten minutes, and that she couldn’t get her poem right until she got to hold him.

Somewhere behind all this, at a basic level, is Ted Hughes’ well-known remark that a writer’s progress “is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system that tells him what he can and cannot do.” Some children believe they cannot write, or that poetry is boring and not for them. Some teachers are not confident in dealing with poetry in the classroom. This is where the outsider, with the fresh angle can be effective - can surprise the children with his or her approach and get them to surprise themselves in what they write. Of course, it is a far easier option to go into a classroom on a few visits, than to work with the same class every day. Hopefully it is a specialist option, that can combine with the work of the class teacher. It is certainly desirable, to say the least, that the children continue to write poetry long after the visiting poet has gone, and I know that in most cases this happens.

When I left college I did not want to be a teacher, so it is ironic that I have become an occasional, sort-of teacher. Sometimes it didn’t seem like a line to follow at all. My first visit to a primary school as a poet was while I had the residency in the 6th form college. I hadn’t a clue how to handle the children and they walked all over me. At the end of the day I was so stressed that I thought I was having a heart attack, and ended up in an ambulance on the way to a south London hospital for an ECG. It was a panic attack. My wife, a teacher, had tried to tell me this when the station manager at Richmond had put me through to her on the phone, having first told her I was having a heart attack. “You’re all right,” she’d said. “Go for a beer.”

I have had teachers other than the class teacher I’ve been working with ask me to read to their class, then tell me in the staffroom that my poems didn’t rhyme. (Most of them did.) I have had to evict surly teenagers from sessions, and I have had stand-up rows with at least one head of English who admitted proudly that he was a Philistine. Mainly, however, I have become more adept at getting children to write - at getting them to surprise themselves, and realise writing can be fun. “Be like spies”, I tell them, “Keep your eyes and ears open for anything you see or hear that’s interesting or different.” And I know I would never have begun writing poetry for children if I hadn’t worked so much with them in the classroom, seeing once again the different logic children have and the ease with which they can be imaginative.

Matthew Sweeney’s most recent book of poetry for adults is Cactii (Secker Warburg). He is the TES guest poet this term and is writer in residence at London’s South Bank Centre.