National Poetry Day 2021

National poetry day

It’s National Poetry Day on the 7th October and it is always worth taking a moment to mark the day. This year’s theme is ‘Choice’ and the EMC suggest a very simple and effective activity that celebrates poetry, gives everyone plenty of opportunities to make choices and to expand the reach of a poem. They write:

To mark the day, we've suggested an activity that takes very little preparation and gives your students genuine opportunities to exercise choice. It's very simple - each student chooses a poem that they would like to give to someone important to them. It could be a teacher, a friend, a family member and so on. Perhaps they'll go home and read it out loud to their important person, or write it out neatly and offer it to them that way.

 You will need a good pile of poetry books to choose from, or access to on-line resources. Some of our favourites include: The Scottish Poetry Library, CLPE, (now a national centre of poetry in primary schools), The American Academy of Poets, and The Poetry Archive.

You might think about making poetry postcards. Each writer has a blank postcard and uses it to write out all or part of a poem, perhaps with an illustration. Then you are all set to have a big poetry exchange. Last June, on National Writing Day, the children in one primary school wrote to each other on bead shaped paper. The results were threaded to make a necklace of messages across the school where children from different year groups  had not been able to work or play together all year.

And while you are immersed in poetry books, why not write a FOUND POEM?

Take words and phrases, maybe whole sentences, from a poetry anthology or collection and stitch them together in a kind of patchwork to make a new poem.

On a similar theme, use newspapers and magazines to make a poem from prose. You can choose to cut out words and phrases and stick them down like an anonymous ransom note. Or you can create the poem by using marker pens to block out the words around the words you have chosen. People sometimes call  this a blackout poem. It is similar to the technique used by Tom Phillips for A Humament. In this case the order of words is determined by the order of the text you are working with.