Learning & outreach

Toolkit Order Form

For your printed copy of the Poetry Toolkit, please fill in the form below.

The Poetry Toolkit distribution is limited to one copy per person and for delivery to the UK only

Learning & outreach

Introduction

Advanced Seminar ad nauseum

Advanced Seminar ad nauseum

Advanced Seminar ad nauseum

Learning & outreach

Interest Form

To receive details of Reading Groups, please complete and submit the form below

Learning & outreach

Interest Form

To receive details of Teachers Workshops, please complete and submit the form below

Learning & outreach

Teachers Toolkit Request

Learning & outreach

Poem Poster Thanks

Grateful thanks to all the poets - firstly for their wonderful poems and secondly for so generously granting us permission to reproduce their work on posters as part of The Poetry Treatment.

FIRST BATCH OF POSTERS

1. Jane Anderson, Tiddly Om Pom Pom (published in Smiths Knoll, 2004)
2. Mourid Barghouti, Interpretations, from A Small Sun, (published by The Poetry Trust, 2003)
3. Connie Bensley, Cardiac Department, from Central Reservations: New & Selected Poems (published by Bloodaxe in 1990)
4. Billy Collins, No Time, from Nine Horses, (published by Picador in 2003)
5. Roy Fisher, Epic, from The Dow Low Drop (published by Bloodaxe in 1996)
6. Vona Groarke, Bournemouth, from Jupiter Street (published by Gallery Books in 2006)
7. Choman Hardi, My Children, from Life for Us (published by Bloodaxe in 2004)
8. David Hart, There Are No Chairs from Running Out (published by Five Seasons Press in 2006)
9. Matt Harvey, Tense Times Table, from The Hole in the Sum of My Parts (published by The Poetry Trust in 2005)
10. Geoff Hattersley, All Weekend, from Back of Beyond (published by Smith/Doorstop in 2006)
11. Jane Hirshfield, Tree, from Each Happiness Ringed by Lions (published by Bloodaxe in 2005)
12. Naomi Jaffa, Twins, from The Last Hour of Sleep (published by Five Leaves in 2003)
13. Louis Jenkins, Marriage, from North Of The Cities (published by Will o’ the Wisp Books in 2007)
14. Michael Laskey, Concert, from The Man Alone: New & Selected Poems (published by Smith Doorstop in 2008)
15. Lorraine Mariner, Stanley, from Bye for Now, (published by The Rialto in 2005)
16. Roger McGough, 40 - Love, from Collected Poems (published by Penguin Books in 2003)
17. Adrian Mitchell, Put your Brain to Bed, from Blue Coffee: Poems 1985-1996, (published by Bloodaxe in 1996)
18. Helena Nelson, Bike with No Hands, from Starlight on Water, (published by The Rialto in 2003)
19. Dean Parkin, Sweet Offer, from Just Our Luck, (published by The Garlic Press in 2008)
20. Christopher Reid, Rabbits and Concrete (2004)
21. Michael Rosen, (Untitled), Selected Poems (published by Penguin in 2007)
22. Naomi Shihab Nye, Please Describe How You Became A Writer, from You and Yours (published by Boa Editions)
23. Aharon Shabtai, The Door, from Love and Selected Poems (published by The Sheep Meadow Press in 1997)
24. Jackie Wills, Appeal, from Fever Tree (published by Arc Publications in 2003)

SECOND BATCH OF POSTERS

1. Moniza Alvi, Indian Cooking, from A Country at my Shoulder (published by Oxford Poets in 1993)
2. Gerard Benson, Not That I’m Superstitious from Omba Bolomba (published by Smith/Doorstop in 2005)
3. Sujata Bhatt, Love In A Bathtub from Point no Point (published by Carcanet in 1997)
4. Mandy Coe, The Blue Row Boat from The Weight of Cows (published by Shoestring Press in 2004)
5. Finuala Dowling, Butter from Notes from The Dementia Ward (published by Kwela Books in 2008)
6. Lorna Goodison, I Am Becoming My Mother from Guinea Woman (published by Carcanet in 2000)
7. David Healey, Late Dragonflies
8. Mimi Khalvati, The Robin And The Eggcup from The Meanest Flower (published by Carcanet in 2007)
9. Liz Lochhead, Phoenix from Dreaming Frankenstein (published by Polygon in 1984)
10. Herbert Lomas, Hard from Trouble (published by Sinclair-Stevenson in 1992)
11. Thomas Lux, And The Mice Made Marriage All Night from God Particles (published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008)
12. Ian McMillan, Life on Earth from Selected Poems published by Carcanet in 1987)
13. Angela McSeveney, Fleas from Coming out with it (published by Polygon in 1992)
14. Esther Morgan, Avocados from Beyond Calling Distance (published by Bloodaxe Books in 2001)
15. Julie O’Callaghan, My Life from Two Barks (published by Bloodaxe in 1998)
16. Alastair Reid, Scotland from When Now is not Now (published by The Poetry Trust in 2006)
17. Peter Sansom, A Dream Mistaking A Person For What He Has Come To Represent from January (published by Carcanet in 1994)
18. Ann Sansom, Instructor from In Praise of Men and other people (published by Bloodaxe in 2003)
19. Robert Seatter, Toast from On the Beach with Chet Baker (published by Seren in 2006)
20. Norman Silver, Txt Commndmnts from Laugh Out Loud (published by tXt café in 2006)
21. Martin Stannard, The Poem Of The Poster, The Poem Of The Film, The Poem Of Three Lines from Difficulties and Exultations (published by Smith/Doorstop in 2001)
22. Jonathan Stevenson, Now We Are Married from The Living Room (published by Arc Publications in 1994)
23. Frances Wilson, From This Window from Rearranging the Sky (published by Rockingham Press in 2004)
24. Anthony Wilson, I Try Not To Shout At Them from Nowhere Better Than This (published by Worple Press in 2002)

THIRD BATCH OF POSTERS

1. John Agard, Queue, Mixed Marriages, Metric Sceptic from We Brits (published by Bloodaxe in 2006)
2. Gillian Allnutt, The Makings of Marmalade from How the Bicycle Shone (published by Bloodaxe in 2007)
3. Connie Bensley, Advice from Private Pleasures (published by Bloodaxe in 2007)
4. Alan Brownjohn, Talking Animals from The Men Around Her Bed (published by Enitharmon Press in 2004)
5. Colette Bryce, A Spider from Self-Portrait in the Dark (published by Picador in 2008)
6. Gerry Cambridge, In the Supermarket from Madame Fi Fi’s Farewell (published by Luath Press in 2003)
7. Kate Clanchy, Driving to the Hospital from Newborn (published by Picador in 2004)
8. Polly Clark, Hedgehog from Take Me With You (published by Bloodaxe in 2005)
9. Imtiaz Dharker, What She Said, What She Said Later from Leaving Fingerprints (published by Bloodaxe in 2009)
10. Maura Dooley, What Every Woman Should Carry from Kissing A Bone (published by Bloodaxe in 1996)
11. Stephen Dunn, Five Roses in the Morning from What Goes On – Selected and New Poems 1995-2009 (published by W W Norton & Co in 2009)
12. Rhian Gallagher, Aunt Trish from Salt Water Creek (published by Enitharmon in 2003)
13. Mark Halliday, Summer Planning from Jab (published by University of Chicago Press in 2002)
14. Matt Harvey, To A Very Special Slope from The Hole in the Sum of My Parts (published by The Poetry Trust in 2005)
15. Michael Laskey, The Light from The Man Alone: New & Selected Poems (published by Smith/Doorstop in 2008)
16. Michael Mackmin, The Kiss from Twenty-Three Poems (published by HappenStance in 2007)
17. Jamie McKendrick, An Encroachment from Crocodiles & Obelisks (published by Faber in 2007)
18. Taha Muhammed Ali, Warning from So What: New & Selected Poems (published by Bloodaxe in 2007)
19. Dennis O’Driscoll, Home from New & Selected Poems (published by Anvil in 2004)
20. Dean Parkin, Luck from Just Our Luck (published by The Garlic Press in 2008)
21. Matt Simpson, Don’t Argue from Matt Wes and Pete (published by Macmillan in 1995)
22. George Szirtes, Water from New & Collected Poems (published by Bloodaxe in 2008)
23. C. K. Williams, Even So from Collected Poems (published by Bloodaxe in 2006)
24. Anna Woodford, Bookcase from Trailer (published by Five Leaves in 2007)

To request a copy of any of the above posters - to be emailed to you as a PDF file - please complete this form.

Learning & outreach

Introduction

Poetry has never been this good!
Year 10 pupil, Westbourne Sports College, Ipswich

Between 2004 and 2008, with substantial support from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, The Poetry Trust devised and delivered an innovative and exemplary four-year ‘poetry in education’ programme in the Eastern Region.

Poetry Matters and Beyond Poetry Matters enabled the Trust to employ its first part-time Learning & Outreach Worker and the projects included:

• termly creative writing workshops for teachers across Suffolk, South Norfolk & North Essex
• annual schools tour - 3 poets giving 12 performances over 5 days to 2,500 teenage pupils
• ‘poetry focus’ schools - sustained residencies in three Suffolk schools

A ‘toolkit’ for teachers designed to share best practice and tried-and-tested exercises for generating creativity in the classroom is available as a free download.

Learning & outreach

Introduction

The Poetry Trust has held a number of highly-rated, informal Poetry Reading Groups.  If you’re interested to be part of the next Reading Group, please drop us an email or call 01986 835950 for more details.

In November 2009 Prize-winning poet and experienced tutor Esther Morgan led the Poetry Reading Group in Halesworth, Suffolk. Six enjoyable, informal evenings of reading and discussion, held fortnightly in Halesworth Library - a friendly introduction to today’s poetry for anyone aged 16 to 100. 

Got to know new poets - fantastic! Enjoyed listening to how others experience the poem as it enriched my own experience and read poems in the group I would have perhaps skipped over if reading on my own…
Reading Group Member 2008

Esther Morgan was born in Kidderminster in 1970 and now lives in Bungay. She has worked as a writing tutor at UEA, an editor, a manager for The Poetry Archive and currently works for Renaissance, a region-wide museums project. Winner of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival First Collection Prize for Beyond Distance Calling (2001), her second volume The Silence Living in Houses followed in 2005. “These precise and understated poems” according to The Guardian “...throw the turmoil lurking just beneath the surface into sharp relief.”

Learning & outreach

Poetry Reading Group

Staff working at the Norfolk & Norwich University Hospital have been meeting weekly since September 2008 to read and talk about contemporary poems. Poet/tutors Jane Anderson & Michael Laskey have led twenty lunch-hour sessions with a small group that included speech therapists, lab technicians and nurses - all of whom were poetry ‘novices’.

Each meeting followed a general theme - for example ‘plants’, ‘animals’, ‘being a woman’, ‘abroad’ - and poems under discussion included work by Fleur Adcock, Eavan Boland, Carol Ann Duffy, Paul Durcan, Vicky Feaver, Ted Hughes, Kathleen Jamie, Derek Mahon, William Matthews, Elma Mitchell, Edwin Muir, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, Theodore Roethke, R S Thomas and Chase Twichell.

Open discussions with the group brings different perspective to poems I would have missed on my own. I also read poems I would probably have dismissed from their title or opening lines.

At the end of March, at their last official Poetry Treatment session, the group expressed an intention to continue to meet regularly, to share poems as well as their sandwiches.

It’s been a wonderful experience and I feel I have gained tremendously from it. Particularly in looking for meaning beyond just the words. Can we do it again?!

Learning & outreach

Introduction

This groundbreaking project has taken poetry into the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital (NNUH) in a series of imaginative ways. Staff, patients and visitors have been enjoying poems on loo doors, in corridors, on restaurant tables and on hospital radio. And hospital staff have taken part in part in free poetry reading and writing workshops led by The Poetry Trust’s Jane Anderson and Michael Laskey.

Michael Laskey’s specially commissioned poem ‘Treatment’, inspired by the life, knowledge and experience of patients and staff, was unveiled at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital in September 2009

Treatment

Back in hospital again today,
no fun, but let’s hear it for the porter
who stopped and asked was I lost.

And for the old boy I was sat next to
whose affability lightened
the wait in that windowless room.

He told me he’d worked from fourteen
on a fruit farm; how to save blackcurrants
from frost, they’d burn fuel oil in drums

all across the field, smoke it off.
With greengages though, how each tree
comes up with a bumper crop

every seventh year, never fails;
how unpropped branches breaking
will make it make new growth.

Michael Laskey
August 2009

The Poetry Treatment began in August 2008 and the initially year-long project was organised in partnership with the NNUH’s Hospital Arts Project and funded by Arts Council England, East, The Limbourne Trust and Norfolk County Council. With thanks to designers Silk Pearce for generous in-kind support. With an estimated 1 million readers reached in the first year and 70% strongly in favour of the poems on loo doors, The Poetry Trust and NNUH Hospital Arts Project are committed to continuing the poster series for at least one further year.

Here’s one of the posters that can currently been found on the loo doors, featuring a poem by Thomas Lux, one of The Poetry Trust’s many American friends.

Press Release

Learning & outreach

Overview

For more than a decade The Poetry Trust has been running creative workshops for teachers. This extensive experience has been condensed into a user-friendly new handbook - The Poetry Toolkit. This offers foolproof recipes for teaching poetry in the classroom and is available free as either a printed booklet or PDFdownload.

This new toolkit provides fun, adaptable, tried-and-tested exercises to get young people - and indeed people of any age - confidently writing poetry. Primary and secondary school teachers who kept on coming to our workshops have repeatedly said what a revelation it was to try writing themselves - putting themselves in the position of their pupils. Dip into the toolkit which is based on direct contributions from leading poet-tutors - including Mandy Coe, Peter Sansom, Jackie Wills and Anthony Wilson - for warm-ups and group exercises based on poem-jigsaws, photographs, eavesdropping and telling lies! Printed copies of the toolkit will be sent to all Suffolk, Essex and Norfolk schools who participated in the workshops.

Teachers Workshops were held most recently in Suffolk in March 2009. They were led by Jane Anderson, The Poetry Trust’s Learning & Outreach expert. Jane is a published poet who taught Secondary English for over twenty years. She has an MA in Creative Writing and now works in a variety of education settings running poetry workshops for pupils and teachers.

These workshops provide examples of exercises to take back to your classroom. They also offer the experience and buzz of writing yourself and space to consider how poetry can help pupils use language more effectively, in literacy and English and across the curriculum. These sessions are suitable for teachers from all key stages.

Really inspiring and gently informative: great for self-development as well as professional ideas.

Make sure you’re on the mailing list to receive advance notice of future dates and publications.

Additional support from
Inclusive School Improvement Service

Grateful thanks to the Ernest Cook Trust and the Barbara Whatmore Trust for supporting the Teachers Workshops

Learning & outreach

Overview

The Poetry Trust is dedicated to developing future readers and audiences for poetry and to encouraging the next generation of poets in the UK.

In the last 20 years, The Poetry Trust has pioneered many innovative outreach projects - many employing poets and using poetry to improve communication skills - and has worked with young children, teenagers, teachers, young offenders, prison inmates, hospital staff and patients, disability groups and the elderly.

If you have any questions about learning & outreach email us