National Poetry Day 2005 looked into the future, with a poll to choose a poem for space, experiments to explore the future of poetry in the Poetry Laboratories, and events around the country.
(for the company of the truthful and beautiful Red Red Shoes
by Charles Way, staged by the Unicorn Theatre for Children)
Human Beings by Adrian Mitchell
from The Shadow Knows: Poems 2000-2004 (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2004)
The Poetry Laboratories explored the future of poetry in various settings around the UK, as shown below:
Warrington Central Libraries hosted a laboratory that brought together libraries, young offenders' institutions, library poetry groups and schools. Poet Mike Garry worked with young men from Thorncross Young Offenders' Institution to investigate, through writing poems, the theme of the Future. They linked up with a local school and Warrington Central Library's dynamic poetry reading group.
The Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle-upon-Tyne put five poets together with fifteen scientists to communicate their subject area, through poetry, to a lay audience. Their experiments were demonstrated at an event on 6 October 2005.
The Poetry Society followed this by holding The Poetry and Science Conference in Newcastle in May, at the Lit & Phil Library. This was followed by an evening reading with Maureen Almond and W. N. Herbert.
We also developed a list of poetry and science-related books, projects and websites.
An exchange between Birmingham poets and the Poetry Society's young Poetry Slambassadors focused on the future generation of spoken word artists. This Poetry Laboratory provided space to explore innovation in spoken word, peer workshopping, recording poetry, and professional development of writing and performance skills, but also focused on the similarities and differences between language and culture - a socio-political exchange, as well.
In Norwich, we discovered what happens when a poet - Rosemary Harris, in this instance - is combined repeatedly with Adult Learner Groups, hosted by the Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library. Rosemary has since given us her preliminary laboratory instructions to post up on our website, should anyone else working in this field wish to conduct their own experiments.
According to the 2001 census, 30% (2.2 million) of London's residents were born outside England. Schoolteachers and headmasters are faced with the challenges of working in a city where over 300 languages are spoken. Taking up a challenge from a teacher from Tower Hamlets, who attended one of our Translation Events this year and spoke eloquently from the floor, we put poet Stephen Watts into a Tower Hamlet school with a Bangladeshi poet. There they explored issues of language and poetry translation (with a chance to introduce 'classic' poetry from another country into an environment where the original language resonated with students). We feel this work could be replicated in any number of schools and languages working with different poets and translators.
In the South East, poet Keith Bennett led research into the possibility of creating a poetry machine. A group of schools on the Isle of Wight were challenged to "design, build and operate a poetry machine" - they worked with a poet in their school to help provoke this approach to poetry. The results were paraded before an audience at Quay Arts Newport on 6 October 2005, hosted by the Poetry Society's Isle of Wight Stanza members.
In the South West, Zeeba Ansari worked with Cornwall Libraries and Victoria Field in Cornish schools, to find ways of working with "virtual poets".
Satellite Laboratories