NATIONAL POETRY DAY (UK)

National Poetry Day is a nationwide celebration of poetry for everyone, everywhere.The idea is to shake poetry from its dust-jacket and into the nations’ streets, offices, shops, playgrounds, train stations and onto the airwaves. It’s a chance for people to use poetry to say things that can’t be said in prose.

National Poetry Day was founded in 1994, and has engaged millions of people across the country with live events, happenings, classroom activities, conversations, broadcasts, semi-comprehensible tweets and spontaneous uncontrollable outbursts of poetry – whether vocal or in the form of pome-graffiti

From 1999 onwards, National Poetry Day has been loosely “themed”: the theme is not prescriptive but serves to fire the imagination.This Years theme is “water, water, everywhere”,in case you want to use it to kick-start activities or as a point of inspiration.

This is in homage to one of the nation’s best-known (and most-frequently misquoted) lines of poetry*.

 

To Start this celebration here is a poem 

Love, like Water

Tumbling from some far-flung cloud
into your bathroom alone, to sleeve
a toe, five, a metatarsal arch,
it does its best to feign indifference
to the body, but will go on creeping
up to the neck till it's reading the skin
like braille, though you're certain it sees
under the surface of things and knows
the routes your nerves take as they branch
from the mind, which lately has been curling
in on itself like the spine of a dog
as it circles a patch of ground to sleep.
Now through the dappled window,
propped open slightly for the heat,
a light rain is composing
the lake it falls into, the way a lover's hand
composes the body it touches - Love,
like water! How it gives and gives,
wearing the deepest of groves in our sides
and filling them up again, ever so gently
wounding us, making us whole.

************************************Julia Copus

This year’s excitements include poets writing in the London Underground, Jordan from Rizzle Kicks performing alongside Mr Gee at Wembley and the incarceration of four Welsh poets overnight, with pen, paper, coffee and orders to create 100 new poems.

Last year National Poetry Day reached 50 million people, for 24 hours. Why not more? We need your help to engage tomorrow’s poetry lovers, not for a day but for a lifetime.

A Glass of Water

Here is a glass of water from my well.
It tastes of rock and root and earth and rain;
It is the best I have, my only spell,
And it is cold, and better than champagne.
Perhaps someone will pass this house one day
To drink, and be restored, and go his way,
Someone in dark confusion as I was
When I drank down cold water in a glass,
Drank a transparent health to keep me sane,
After the bitter mood had gone again.

********************************May Sarton

Resources

The Poetry Society

Scottish Poetry Library

Talking points

Lesson Plans

Posters

Audio + Video

National Poetry Day

Twitter(National Poetry Day)

 

Grab a poem, & someone you love, then read, whisper, sing, shout it to them. Say hi to a colleague – tell them about National Poetry Day, spread the danger…..celebrate the day……..

This poem ……….Elma Mitchell.

This poem is dangerous: it should not be left
Within reach of children, or even of adults
Who might swallow it whole, with possibly
Undesirable side-effects.If you come across
An unattended, unidentified poem
In a public place, do not attempt to tackle it
Yourself. Send it (preferably in a sealed container)
To the nearest centre of learning, where it will be rendered
Harmless, by experts. Even the simplest poem
May destroy your immunity to human emotions.
All poems must carry a Government warning. Words
Can seriously affect your heart.

Has nothing to do with water, but I just loved the idea behind it

Pomesallsizes

PARRISH LANTERN'S - Pocket Anthology

 

* The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.