National Poetry Day 2005: The Future
09 October 2005
What an amazing poetry day it was. The machines were stunning and the designs for machines were also stunning and the poetry produced was exceptional. This has to be the future when children produce poems that bend the ear inside out like the ones we heard and read on NPD.
Not only that but Daniel Roberts has built a beautiful 'poetry machine' out of reclaimed wood including heart shaped cogs that interlock and turn the pages on a beautiful book of poems.
Now here's an idea, Daniel also operates the poetry box scheme on the Isle of Wight, placing poems in the most unusual places; Newtown Creek next to a rotting hulk of a boat the poem is revealed at low tide; or carved into a rock the shape of the island for the walker to find on Binstead Beach; or mown into the grass so that it could only be seen from above. He is working on a poetry trail throughout the Isle of Wight, perhaps your poem could be beamed onto to the Needles, instead of that swinging light, or written in the coloured sand and allowed to be gathered by tourists.
Watch out for great poetic happenings on the Isle of Wight including this limerick penned by the most famous poet of all on NPD at Quay Arts Newport IOW:
There once was a poet from Ryde
Whose poems never rhymed though he tried.
I'll write a limerick
Even if it makes me sick
He cried, as he tried, then he died.
by Anon.
06 October 2005
Well the future is here and it's national poetry day. I'm incredibly excited as the word is that there are some weird and wonderful poetry machines being constructed at Quay Arts Newport IOW and I'll be off on the ferry to see themn and work with the children that are turning up to help us celebrate NPD. erhaps the following haiku by a young poet from Ryde School will give you an indication of the sort of talent there is for the future:
Dolphins by Hayley Allen
Gliding through the sea
Shines, in shimmering sunlight
Gentle natured beast.
I just know there are going to be more gems like that at Quay Arts and I find it fantastically exciting that the future of poetry is in such good hands. Have a great NPD, I'll let you know how things went on the Island later.
01 October 2005
October the first and time to harvest my grapes, chateau stella maris is a cheeky little number when the birds and the children don't steal the crop! Time to collect some more pebbles and write on them for NPD. I'm also looking forward to down-loading all the input I've received from the children I've worked with on the Isle of Wight, it really is a beautiful place, no wonder Tennyson liked it.
30 September 2005
An evening workshop at Carisbrooke High as part of an open evening for the school with prospective students and their parents wandering around getting a feel of the place. The students were certainly up for some word invention and rhyming and they created their own designs for poetry machines as well as some excellent poems about the future. What was really spooky was that two children said hello to me, they were from Middle Schools I had visited earlier in the week. The NPD event at Quay Arts in Newport IOW on Thursday 6th October is shaping up to be a monster affair, with poetry machines of all shape and sizes plus students and poets and the public getting together to celebrate poetry of the future!!!
29 September 2005
Blow wind blow, rain pour down. Wednesday and the week has been packed with poetic action on the Isle of Wight.
At Ryde School we made some amazing poems about machines and weird poetry type animals and in a year three class a monster class poem about 10 ice creams that went bare-shark-back riding, sumo-wrestling and surfing etc before they melted down to zero.
At Osborne Middle School we worked in the school hall generating wierd and wonderful words for school dinners and the names our pets call us and writing poems about anything and everything. Students kept coming and going all morning it was high energy great fun and there should be some great poems for National Poetry Day at Quay Arts.
A great day today in Ryde High School with two sparky year nine classes to start off with who had some brilliant words for poetry and machines. On to a Design and Technology class with students clinging to the benches and somewhat surpirsed to be face to face with a poet when they thought they were going to do something mechanical, they designed mini-machines that wrote micro-poems but plan to build a machine for Quay Arts. The another sparky year nine group followed by an art class where I read a poem and they responded to the poem with some amazing pictures, I felt humbled and excited and knocked out by their skilled art work.
I'm shattered but when it goes as good as it has this week, it's great to be knackered. October 6th NPD on the Isle of Wight should be the poetic experience of the island, bigger than Tennyson they reckon!
26 September 2005
sometimes the machine works best when it is at rest, I have a swing seat in ther garden and sitting, swinging, sipping a beer lets the mind freewheel, nexct week I'll be visiting 5 schools and working with children from year 1 through to a community class of older writers. I'm looking forward to it. It is very stimulating watching people think about poetry from a very different point of view, those epiphanies that occur as a bulb goes on and that great machine starts to turn over and work on what makes a poem work. The younger children have fantastic ways of putting their ideas across, uninhibited as they are in their choice and use of language. Now here's a thing too, put a rap beat on Daffodils and you get a brilliant contemporary rap poem! I use it to get the children thinking about what makes a good poem and contrast a boring reading of the poem with the rap version, so far the vote has gone 100% to the rap version, so we know we have to build the rhythm section of the poetry machine very carefully. May all your poetry machines produce great poems
21 September 2005
I live in a beautiful part of the country, beside the sea at Lymington. Today the marshes were absolutely stunning, an amazing natural poetry machine of sound coming at me from all directions; a parliament of magpies, a swanherd of swans with thweir ugly ducklings playing chase, blackbirds fighting their own territorial battles, curlew, heron, egrets and a shy kingfisher losing its shyness as the waters of deadman's creek boiled with small fry, tiny 5 pence fishes skipping across the warm salty water, yes, a kingfisher and salty walter! At full tide Oxey Lake is a mirror to the blue sky and eight acre pond throws up two egrets with legs impossibly long lengthened in the reflection. Out to play; Calico; Glasgow and Stonehenge have slack moorings, nod in a line, like old folk asleep, Cenwulf throws a wash coming back from Yarmouth as Cenred kicks out for the Island. The cattle on the Salt Marshes groan. The water company workmen are stripped to the waste and cursing across the water where the bass turn and toil in the gentle swell that hides the entrance to the marina, these are huge fish and they disturb the surface with their close cut runs toward an easy meal. The pebbles with words on them, shift, 'one fine day' they arrange themselves into and the tinny radio of the angler who can see but they don't touch his bait, announces the storm has been upgraded in the Bay of Mexico, how could you leave the shore when it shines like this?
20 September 2005
What is it about words that they can have lives of their own? Can 'electric' be onomatopoeic? what does electricity sound like anyway? Is jelly suitable for fish and babies? What is electric jelly? A recent poetry machine constructed by an eight-year old produced the line ' for my birthday I want electric jelly' clearly this is a line from a poem about the future. Obviously the electric jelly will be orange, because as the eight year old explained, the future's bright, the future's orange. The eight year old thinks her television has become a poetry machine and I think she might be right. Do those ads really do exactly what it says on the box? How many use rhyme? How many use poetry? Do we have time enough to wait for the answers?
on a post card please or placed here in this blog!
16 September 2005
There is an autumnal feel in the air today- autumn was always exciting being the start of the rugby season maybe?I've just read through the other laboratories and blogs going on and that is incrediby exciting too. I wonder if the scientists in the North East could concoct a poetry machine and then think perhaps they are with the poets they are working with. The wind is moaning down the chimney and a sudden draft has lifted some of those words cut out from the magazines for the schools poetry machines; 'fish reformat mine' I record before collecting them up and putting them back into the 'pot'. I must cut up the scientific journal I have and use 'fish reformat mine as a title.
15 September 2005
All day at Swanmore School on the Isle of Wight designing poetry machines; words flying through the air, words rolling on the ground, poems made about machines, machines made from poems. A fabulous day. Those were real words flying through the air, cut out from magazines and allowed to float down to form a bizarre string of sentences that the children knotted into poems. They were real words rolling on the ground, written on pebbles, beachfulls of them, greys, whites, browns, silver, gold, that the children built into careful cairns of poetry. See, your machine does not have to be high tech!(although it could be) it does not have to work on electricity (although it might) someone suggested a pony pawing the ground, writing a horse poem, one step for 'A', two steps for 'B' and so on, a haiku could take all day, but what a haiku it would be. These children are definately writing poems for the Future. The last line of one I particularly remember; 'She likes smoking footprints.' Then the young poet sneezed and blew her poem away!
12 September 2005
Of course one of the main drivers for contemporary poetry are current events and cricket has always had its poetical side but the Ashes at the moment are almost too intense for words. It could make a fabulous machine though as you try and create words to express the emotions...perhaps I'll look back on this later on tonight and see what the feelings are then!
06 September 2005
I live on the coast and I've created a wonderful low tech poetry machine out of pebbles that I have written words on and I can handraulically arrange into lines, poems, ideas, nonsense, goliath slayers etc.
Is there a random wireless tuner that could provide instant sound poems?
01 September 2005
A programme on BBC2 linking the birth of spiritualism with scientific advancement and all this happened in 1848. It is clear that the clockwork poetry machine is a combination of both and augurs well for the 'Future!'
KB
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