There's a poem for every occasion if you can just find time to write it, so if you only put pen to paper once this year, make today the day, on the subject of your choice
Today is National Poetry Day, a day on which people across Britain and Ireland are invited to celebrate the art and fun of verse. At the heart of National Poetry Day is the belief that poetry can and should be for everyone, everywhere. As our contribution to this aspiration, this month's Poster Poems challenge is not tied to the usual idea of a single theme, topic, form or style. This time you are invited to post whatever kind of poem you want, and as many of them as you like.
You might well ask why would anyone want to write a poem in the first place? Well, poems allow us to express ourselves in ways that would never ordinarily occur to us and to say things that we can't say as well in prose. As Robert Frost once wrote, the initial delight in writing a poem is "remembering something I didn't know I knew". What Frost meant was, I think, that you may start out with an idea for a poem, something you want to say, but the act of writing it down, of playing with the rhythm, the wording and the sound can lead you to discover things about yourself and your world that you didn't really know where there before the poem was written.
People are moved to write poems for any number of different reasons: you might have seen something that strikes you as particularly beautiful, be in love with someone, or be really angry about a social injustice. Perhaps you want to share a memory, or make people laugh with a Limerick. Perhaps, like Dylan Thomas, you have "fallen in love with words". There are as many reasons to write a poem as there are people writing them, and every one of them is valid.
The American writer Robert Creeley once wrote an essay called "Is that a real poem, or did you just make it up", a title that came from a question that was asked once after a reading. It's a funny question, but one that reflects the all-too-common view that poems are written by odd, distant, vaguely glamorous and frequently dead people, "real poets". The reality is, however, somewhat more prosaic.
Most poets are ordinary people living normal lives who happen to have "fallen in love with words" and who have, as a result, this uncomfortable itch that can only be scratched by writing poems. They have something they want to say and poetry provides them with a wide range of possible ways of saying it. Some use rhyme and traditional forms like the sonnet or ballad. Others may prefer to write in free verse or even more experimental forms. Some may even use a mixture of both. The poems they write can be as long as a book or no longer than three lines and they are often about the most ordinary events depicted in the most everyday language imaginable. It doesn't really matter what style you use once it allows you to write the poem you want to write and say the thing you want to say.
And so, this National Poetry Day, why not have a go yourself? Poster Poems has always welcomed poems from everyone, and nobody here is going to pass judgment on what you write. The whole idea is to enter into the spirit of the day, enjoy the process, and maybe learn something along the way, and that last bit is optional. Let's celebrate poetry in the best possible way, by writing and sharing poems.
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