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07 October 2023

Posted by Robyn O'Mahony

National Poetry Day

The third week of autumn term saw us honour National Poetry Day, embracing the annual celebration of the form as a guide for our writing practice.

We kicked off proceedings with a meditation of sorts; a creative exploration of our favourite words. Anna, the lead facilitator, named it ‘dancing on the page’, and that’s what we did! We explored word association and thought about why we like the words we landed on. We talked about the sounds of words, the feeling of them on our tongues and their diverse meanings. We heard slay, hope, bravery, wondrous and meh, and enjoyed the sharing of words to expand the language at our disposal.

The Junior Writers ran with the day’s theme and were excited to create their own poems. We presented them with the image of a sunflower field interspersed with door frames and with that, they were off on their writing journeys. As they wrote, we encouraged the group to write creatively about what they have seen, rather than simply writing what they see, and this lent to some beautiful outputs. 

With our Young Writers, we took the same image but twisted the offering. Instead of taking the sunflowers as visual inspiration for a poem, we asked the group to embody the sunflower - to write as if they were the flower itself. It was an invitation to adopt personification as a foundation for free writing. 

The community discussed their approaches to the activity and their ways around creative challenges. They were curious with their explorations of life as a sunflower, producing rich imagery and moving prose. ‘Everyone sleeps and I cry.’

We then turned our attention to refuge, the theme of this year’s National Poetry Day. We thought about what the word evokes for us and, among others, came up with home, asylum, safety and war. We asked: is refuge a place or person? A smell or a sensation? We then mapped out all our individual associations.

Before diving into 15 minutes of free writing we read Soup Sister by Rebecca Perry. A beautiful poem about the idiosyncrasies of someone we love, the community were intrigued by the piece and dived into a deep conversation about its meaning, their favourite lines, and how it made them feel.

To end the session, we shared our writing. Based on the theme of refuge, and pouring everything we heard, noted down and spoke about during the session, we celebrated each other’s work. And we leave you now with, ‘I saw a crow that looked like you, and you saw a cloud that looked like me.’

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