Interview: Why Michael Rosen will relish being the Children's Laureate

Born to teacher parents in Pinner, north London, in 1946, Michael Rosen went to grammar schools in Harrow and Watford and then to Wadham College, Oxford, where he began to write drama and poetry. He joined the BBC as a trainee, studied film, acted and wrote; his first poetry collection for children came out in 1974. Since then he has published well over 100 books for children while constantly performing, lecturing and presenting BBC radio programmes. His new publications include a volume of Selected Poems (Penguin), and What's so Special about Shakespeare? and Who the Dickens was Dickens? (Walker). Married for a third time, with seven children, Rosen is the Children's Laureate for the next two years.

A sprightly 61-year-old, whose pointed ears and forked smile make him look something like an overgrown faun, Michael Rosen is a man gripped by language. Words creep up on him unawares, to be scribbled down and worked later into poems. Words set off memories, suggest bizarre associations ("The tents are feeling tense") and pose questions to be discussed later on Word of Mouth, the Radio 4 programme he presents. Words tumble out of him whether he is teaching, talking or writing anywhere he can find the time and space, as often as not on a train or bus. "Someone recently asked me to describe my study. I told them I had never had one."

Fully booked for months ahead, Rosen has for the past 30 years only known what each day is going to bring by checking his personal organiser the night before. Now life is becoming even more hectic. Thrice married with seven children, the last two still infants, he has just been made Children's Laureate, the first poet to become the face of British children's literature. Following the novelist Jacqueline Wilson, his appointment lasts for two years. So with even more people now wanting a piece of him, does Rosen now feel a hunted man?

"Not a bit of it. I have always loved what I do and look forward now to doing the same sort of thing but at a more intense level," he says. And enjoyment seems to bubble up whenever Rosen is around. Making children laugh during his poetry readings is one of his particular specialties. But there is much else going on: around 140 books, including poetry collections, novels, re-told classics, non-fiction and picture books. He currently teaches on an MA course at Birkbeck College in London, and before that was awarded a PhD by what was then the University of North London. At home, there is reading or telling stories to his own children, with the usual uproarious results. He makes it all sound so much fun. Are there any downsides?

"Well, attacking the national curriculum's favouring of literacy as an end in itself while pushing open-ended literary enjoyment into the sidelines isn't particularly enjoyable. But it has to be done, and I do it whenever I can, along with other children's writers. And it may just be – fingers crossed – that we're beginning to see something of a breakthrough here."

There is also a tragedy in his life that never gets any easier to live with. One April evening in 1999 his 18-year-old son Eddie – always the most anarchic character in Rosen's family poems – went to bed early complaining of a cold. Next day he was found dead from meningitis. Rosen's grief is recorded in Carrying the Elephant. This collection takes its title from a postcard he saw of a man apparently doing just that.

The image refers now not just to the weight of Rosen's subsequent misery. "Eddie was so big by the time he died that he sometimes used to pick me up – and I am over six foot – put me over his shoulders in a fireman's lift and spin me round." Now it is his father who carries the memory of his son, a heavy burden in every way.

This collection starts with poems drawn from Rosen's childhood recollections and ends with snapshots of his life today, married again and with another young family. Poems about Eddie's death and its agonising aftermath make up the middle section. A letter of condolence is answered, "It's nice of you to say you'll always remember him. You won't." Another imaginary letter from Rosen himself starts, "Dear National Blood Service, he was proud to have given but he hasn't any."

He has also written directly about Eddie in Michael Rosen's Sad Book, illustrated by his long-time collaborator Quentin Blake. In it Rosen talks directly about the tragedy. "Where is sad? Sad is anywhere. It comes along and finds you." There are also moments of enjoyment, remembering "Eddie walking along the street and laughing and laughing and laughing". But the final picture, of Rosen grey-faced and looking into a candle, makes the point that this is one story where there will never be a happy ending. "When children ask me now about the Eddie they hear so much about, I simply tell them that he is dead. They always accept this in a much more matter-of-fact way than any adult audience would, and then go on to the next question."

What about his plans for the next two years? "Well, I am going to do my best to release the reading of poetry from the vice-like grip of the literacy strategy by spreading the excitement of poetry through books, performances, festivals, internet, conferencing... So why not a travelling poetry roadshow, provisional title From John Agard to Benjamin Zephaniah? Or a YouTube website where poets and children share performances? I would also like to help picture books find the larger audience they increasingly seem to be missing. And then I've got this idea for a series of literature trails... showing young readers where their local writers and poets lived and worked."

Rosen himself had parents who spent hours sharing stories, poems and plays with him and his older brother. Both gifted Jewish schoolteachers from London's East End, and communists until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, they presided over a childhood he repeatedly returns to in his verse. Memories of conversations round the table, camping holidays, junior episodes of crime and punishment and bedtime chats with his brother are set against the background of suburban north London school life, where he had a good time both in and outside the classroom.

By recording his fascination with how extremely odd his parents, friends, teachers and himself could be, Rosen hopes to give children a means of recognising and validating some of their own quirky memories. He cites as one example the reaction he always gets when he reads out his now-famous poem, "Chocolate Cake".

This rambling account looks at first sight as if dashed off in a few minutes. This is not so, but children coming across it could well imagine that writing poetry that does not bother about meter or rhyme is not really that difficult. If this leads them to try out the same thing for themselves some time, Rosen would be the first to applaud. The poem describes himself as a child going downstairs after midnight to have another go at a half-finished chocolate cake in the fridge. One crumb leads to another and suddenly the whole cake has disappeared. Next morning he is faced down by his furious mother. "You haven't eaten it, have you?" At this point, reading the poem to children, Rosen always stops, asking how he should have answered. "Invariably the room divides. Half the kids yell out 'Say yes!', the other half beg me to say no." He goes on to the next line, containing his own desperately disingenuous reply, "I don't know", and the room erupts in laughter.

This, for Rosen, is what it is all about. "I see children using my writing like a catalyst, tuning into its small hurts, jokes and fantasies as a means to explore their own. I have always believed that poems should leave a gap after they have finished within which children are left free to roam in their own imaginations – in this case, what they might have said to their own mother. And in an ideal educational world, a classroom where there is still time for free discussion could form the perfect arena for exploring such responses in all their individual variety. Not – most emphatically not – for any assessment purposes, but as part of the far more important business of examining what it is to be human."

So what does the new Children's Laureate make of the success of Harry Potter? Do JK Rowling's stories represent a new age of child involvement in fiction, or the last gasp of an adventure-story formula stretching back to past juvenile heroes? "I think the secret of their success lies in the way Rowling has made Harry into a type of vulnerable Messiah figure, destined to be The One who faces rival and deadly dangers. We, the readers, find ourselves enlisted in the imagination to help him overcome them. But I hope kids also find their way to similar thrills from other fiction. Diana Wynne Jones? China Miéville? Terry Pratchett? There are so many other brilliant contenders out there."

We have over-run, an easy thing to do with Rosen, who has so much to say. Now he has to go to answer questions from members of a reading website, then set off to a school poetry reading. Neither audience, nor any of the many more he will have in the two years to come, look likely to leave feeling in any way disappointed.

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