National Poetry Day 2009

This year's National Poetry Day will be on Thursday, 8th October, its theme will be "Heroes and Heroines."
 

National Poetry Day 2008

Last year, National Poetry Day took place on Thursday, 9 October 2008, with the theme of 'Work'.

Watch a short video about everyday people and their work
Filmed on National Poetry Day. Created by if:book

The winners of our Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award were announced on National Poetry Day at a prizegiving ceremony which took place at the Coin Street Neighbourhood Centre in Southwark, London.

Please visit the official National Poetry Day website to download lesson plans, to read about events that happened on the day itself, and to find out which jobs have been keeping poet in residence Paul Farley busy over the last few weeks. 

NPD Events 

Poetry Landmarks - what's happening in your area on National Poetry Day.  

Poetry Society Members' favourite 'work' poems

Christopher North recommends: Tractor by Ted Hughes from Moortown. "A great poem that's almost a physical experience".

The starter lever
Cracks it action, like a snapping knuckle.
The battery is alive – but like a lamb
Trying to nudge its solid frozen mother –
While the seat claims my buttock bones, bites
With the space-cold of earth, which it has joined
In one solid lump.
I squirt commercial sure-fire down the black throat – it just coughs.
It ridicules me – a trap of iron stupidity...

Alison Brackenbury recommends: The Right Hand of a Mexican Farmworker in a Somerset County, Maryland, by Martin Espada. "It is bare, truthful, and strangely lyrical. It ends...

                  Christ
had hard hands
too.

"It is on p.49 of Alabanza:new and selected poems 1982-2002, Norton, 2003 ISBN 0 393 32621 7. The poem can be read in full in The San Francisco Chronicle review at
www.martinespada.net/alabanza1.htm. Hope you enjoy reading it!"
 
Frances Green recommends: U A Fanthorpe's Now What from Qeueing for the Sun. "It is a spot-on set of observations on the downside of work in academia and the prospect of being released from them."

I hereby release you from time;
From the tyranny of small comfortless rooms;
From crammed distressful lunchbreaks;
From coffee in paper cups...

"It means a lot to me because I recently left a job in which all her observations were very accurate. Elsewhere in the poem she writes..."

I invest you with the month of September,
Which you were last able to attend to
At the age of four...

"I left my job at the end of August and have had my first free September since, indeed, the year before I first went to school - blissful!"

Ben Wilkinson recommends: The Bearhug by Nick Laird from To a Fault (Faber, 2005). "Interestingly enough, I first came across Northern Irish poet Nick Laird in Poetry Review; four poems of his – The Bearhug among them – appearing in the Summer 2003 issue. It grabbed my initial attention over the other three for a simple enough reason: empathetic recognition. After all, there may be some lucky people out there doing what they love for a living, but when a poem's opening stanza is the portrait of a bloke who's stuck working a job he doesn't much like and hiding poems like..."

fishbone[s] in / [his] briefcase

"(a potential metaphor for any buried aspirations) many people might well nod or sigh in recognition."

"But the poem – like all good poems – isn't that simple. It's also a deft analysis of the detritus, detachment and various downsides to late capitalist society."

An open armed crane turns to embrace the aeroplanes passing
above

Margaret Stanfield recommends:  "a 'Work' poem by the well-known English poet Alamgir Hashmi (from his The Poems of Alamgir Hashmi, NBF, 1992) - The Man who Worked the Nights"

"I deeply enjoy its precise observation through objects and situations"

...for each time / the door-knob turned, the wife / knew it was
him, late;

"easy (though difficult to achieve) conversational music lending itself to a witty, humorous, everyday portrait of a lifestyle. It is a lifestyle in which work sneaks up on self, society, and family and takes over everything except itself. But what a wonderful short poem it is to let us have fun with ourselves, and know ourselves as we are day to day or night to night."

Katherine Gallagher recommends: The Forge by Seamus Heaney (Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966 - 1996). "It is a sonnet set in a blacksmith's shop in Ireland, and reminds me of my farmer father working as a blacksmith back in Australia in the fifties."

Inside, the hammered anvil's short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end square,
Set there immovable: an altar
where he expends himself in shape and music...

George Baines recommends: A.J.S Tessimond's Daydream

And work will be simple and swift as a seagull flying
 

Competitions

Stanza Poetry Competition - announced on National Poetry Day
Visit the Stanza pages to see who won this year's competition, announced on National Poetry Day.

Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award - announced on National Poetry Day
The Poetry Society's 'Young National Poetry Competition', this prize is open to poets ages 11-17 and is supported by the Foyle Foundation. The prize giving ceremony will take place on National Poetry Day itself. All 100 winners will be invited. The top fifteen winners aged 15-17 will spend a week on an Arvon residency course with their judges in 2009.

National Poetry Competition
Now in its 31st year, the Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition is one of the leading poetry prizes. It attracts entries from Nantwich to Nairobi and offers to anyone who enters the opportunity to discover their own potential as a writer. Whether you are an established poet or a budding writer, winning often provides that essential spur to take your writing further.

For further details on all our competitions, please follow this link.

Education Work

The Poetry Society has an extensive education program with projects in schools, Poetryclass INSET days, school membership packages, the Londonwide slam championship, and a number of exciting projects planned for our Centenary in 2009. To find out more about the education work that we offer, please get in touch with the Education Team.

Background to National Poetry Day

Since 1994 National Poetry Day has engaged millions of people with poetry, through a range of live events and web-based activities for people young and old throughout the country. Such a variety of poetry is being written and read these days that we decided to choose a different theme each year to highlight particular poets and styles of poetry.  One year we had Roger McGough as our poet in residence to explore the theme of 'Britain'; another year we invited some of Britain's top chefs to help contribute poems and recipes to a book on the theme of 'Food'; last year we took a poll to determine whose poem on the theme of 'the future' should be sent into space (the winner was Adrian Mitchell's 'Human Beings'). In 2006, we jumped into one of the hot topics of today's world to explore the theme of 'identity' through poetry, and last year we delved into dreams.

Previous years: