"What does it mean, to see the world as a poet does?" That was one of the questions posed yesterday in the U.K. on National Poetry Day, the "annual mass celebration of poetry and all things poetical." Participants were invited to "join in, breaking with the tyranny of prose by thinking of a poem and sharing it imaginative ways, with the hashtags #nationalpoetryday and #thinkofapoem." The Forward Arts Foundation coordinated with Macmillan Childrens Books to nominate 11 poets as NPD Ambassadors, "with special responsibility for igniting enthusiasm nationwide."
This year's theme was Light. In Bristol, National Poetry Day ambassador Liz Brownlee rounded up the city's light workers--including an astronomer, a firefighter, a cosmologist, a fire-eater and many more--to read poems about light for films to be displayed on the Big Screen in the city center. Videos from Guardian readers dedicated poems to babies, partners, friends and goats.
Physicist Stephen Hawking, along with actors Samantha Morton and Sean Bean, "joined forces with leading artists to make a series of short films encouraging people to dispense with prose for a day and make like a poet." In a film created by the artist Bridget Smith, Hawking recites a poem called "Relativity," which was written for him by the Forward prize-shortlisted poet Sarah Howe: "They say/ a flash seen from on and off a hurtling train/ will explain why time dilates like a perfect/ afternoon.../ If we can think/ this far, might not our eyes adjust to the dark?"
Across the pond, I celebrated National Poetry Day by re-reading something old (Philip Larkin's Collected Poems) and something new (John Burnside's Black Cat Bone). I also have an NPD gift for you in these lines from "Elegy: In Coherent Light" by the American/British poet Anne Stevenson: "My brains a film, I'm made of timed exposures,/ And pounding my ears and eyes with waves of light--/ These animate flakes, these pictures I call sight." --Robert Gray, contributing editor
