The UK’s National Poetry Day took place on Thursday 4th October.
The given theme was “change” – which seemed topical enough.
I took real and enormous pleasure in spending some of the day in St Katherine’s School in Pill, on the outskirts of Bristol. I was acting as poet-in-very-temporary-residence, a public position with a slightly hazy job description, but one I aspire to.
The role included giving a poetry reading during the lunch hour. Here in pdf are the poems I read, set out in the order I chose to read them. I think they worked pretty well and reading to that keen young audience felt just wonderful.
Most of the poems are mine, but not all. The vast majority of those that were not mine were taken from the project I run called “Poems for…the wall” which supplies poems for public display, free of charge. In all cases, permission to publish was requested and granted some time ago, on the understanding that the work concerned would not be sold for profit and the settings in which we published or displayed it would be public ones, such as waiting room or class room. I re-publish them here, on the understanding that the same – or sufficiently similar – conditions apply.