Today is National Poetry Day 2025. As a fervent poetry-lover, it seems remiss to me that poetry should be celebrated in this way on only one day of the year. I’d definitely be up for National Poetry Week, or even Month, if we have to limit it at all.
I’ve loved poetry since I was a kid. I remember being bought ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’ by my grandmother one Christmas. They were what I’d now describe as sweet and simple poems, which fitted the bill back then, but aren’t to my taste nowadays. I remember writing poems at primary school, probably in the vein of those I’d read, always trying to find the right rhyme!
In secondary school, there were definitely poems I loved and poems I didn’t amongst those I studied. I remember finding RS Thomas far too dour, and Keats and Wordsworth too flowery. But Wilfred Owens … his poems really affected me, and I have continued to love them. I also discovered Czech poet Miroslav Holub, whom I had the very good fortune to meet almost 10 years later at a poetry reading in Brighton. We were also extremely fortunate that Gillian Clarke came to our school – not just to read to us, but to work with small groups on poetry writing. I guess she must have been just starting out… who knew she would go on to be the National Poet?
At A-level, my love affair with French poetry began, and this continued at University. My poetry shelves (yes, I have whole shelves of poetry books) are still home to some of the books I studied from – Baudelaire’s ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’, Prevert’s ‘Paroles’ and Eluard’s ‘Capitale de la Douleur’ are all still there and well-worn. Such a nerd am I, that I can still quote from some of them! My tutors would be proud.
I have continued to amass poetry collections – I am partial to a good themed anthology (such as the Being Alive / Staying Alive collections), to anthologies of poems by female poets, and to collections that I invest in on the strength of an individual poem by a poet I have read. Letting me go to a poetry reading is highly dangerous for my bank account – as my friends will testify, I cannot resist and never leave empty handed! Recent purchases have included ‘Sex on toast’ by Topher Mills, ‘Over the Moon’ by Imtaz Dharkar, and ‘All the men I never married’ by Kim Moore.
Apart from reading the stuff myself, I have thoroughly enjoyed teaching poetry during my career in the classroom. Shakespeare sonnets to Year 9 was a challenge I relished, and the dreaded ‘unseen poetry comparison’ of GCSE English Lit exams, I approached with gusto. My raison d’etre became convincing my students that their interpretations couldn’t be wrong, as long as they could find justification for them in the poems, and that sometimes it really was less complicated than they thought! I’ve taught poetry in creative writing classes for adults too, using the stimulus of some of my favourite poems to get them thinking and writing.
I continue to dabble in writing poetry myself. I find the opportunity to craft something quite contained very fulfilling. I don’t strive for rhyme any more, preferring free verse. I’m not great at editing my own work… what comes out is often exactly what I wanted to say in that moment and it’s difficult to change it for that reason.
In August, I did a two-day creative writing summer school with ‘Writing Room’, of which one of the half-day sessions was presented by poet Paul Lyalls. I wrote a poem that I was really pleased with, and off the back of that I’ve enrolled on a weekly online class with him. I’m really enjoying his guidance and the different techniques that we’re using. It’s also great to have time to write every week and I’m hoping that this will be the impetus I need to write more regularly and start identifying groups of poems that could make a publishable collection. Well, I can dream!
This has become a rather effusive blog post! And I’ve already thought of several other anecdotes I could relate about my lifelong poetry addiction! But I’ll leave it there for now and sign off with a poem by Rhian Elizabeth, which I heard at the Penarth Literary Festival at a time when I was ‘recovering’ from a fallout with my daughter. It said so much to me that it made me smile at the same time as welling up. I’m sure mothers of daughters will relate! Enjoy xx
50shadesofbrave 