National Poetry Day

On Monday the Year 13 English students devised and ran an assembly to celebrate National Poetry Day. The theme this year was the environment and as this August marked the centenary of the birth of one of Britain’s best-loved poets, Phillip Larkin, they thought they would commemorate the day by looking at how he approached this theme. We were given an overview of his life and work and then poems were read to the hall, with MCMXIV, in particular, going down a storm.

On Thursday, the day of National Poetry Day itself, the Sixth Form and a handful of Year 10 and 11 students were treated to assemblies and workshops with the poet Ella Frears, organised by our wonderful librarian, Ms Ramsden. Year 11 students were given the poem ‘I Remember’ by Joe Brainard, which inspired their own poems based on memories, and the poem ‘Four A.M.’ by Wislawa Szymborska, which inspired poems about times of the day. Year 10 students read poems by Yoko Ono and Caroline Bird and played the Rules game, where they invented rules for writing poems and then wrote poems based on them. At lunchtime, Ella ran a session with A Level English students where they experimented with the prose poetry form using anaphora to create work around a range of themes, such as consumerism, identity and human feelings.