Mrs Graves (Head of English)
At the start of the week, the Poetree was bare-limbed, in the last stages of its summer slumber. By the end of the week, however, it had been brought back to life; National Poetry Day had arrived.
Every year on the first Thursday of October we celebrate National Poetry Day, offering students and staff opportunities to read, write and enjoy poetry as a form of creative expression. This year’s theme of choice prompted us to think about a form of writing which many of our students hadn’t encountered before: found poetry.
In found poetry, writers use an (often non-literary) source text, and select words and phrases from within the text to create a poem. The poem can be completely thematically different from the source- it is merely a collection of words to provide inspiration. We asked all students in Years 7-9 to bring in a text of their choice and use ‘page 17’ as the prompt for their writing.
Unwilling to be left out, many of our Years 10-Upper Sixth classes have also taken up the challenge, using their set texts and wider reading as sources for their poems. The Lower Sixth IB group enjoyed seeking new meaning in Simone de Beauvoir’s classic feminist text, The Second Sex, while some Year 11 classes created found poems on the characters from the perennial favourite Of Mice and Men.
The poems produced demonstrated the imaginative skills of the students as they transformed their source material into expressive and thoughtful poems, many of which tackled issues beyond the scope of the original text.
As always, we loved hearing from our colleagues in different departments about how they were inspired by National Poetry Day too, from the Lower Sixth Geographers using their textbooks to create found poetry, to the Computer Science department sharing a compression poem for us all to decode. Thank you to everyone for accepting our challenge to step outside of your comfort zone!
Now that the Poetree is once more alive with the colourful offerings of October, we hope that it will be a great talking point for all of our students, as well as a fantastic display of the creative talents on offer at BGS for our visitors.
All students are invited to submit an entry for the House Poetry Celebration: deadline 2nd November. Entries can be posted in the poetry post box in M114. Please contact Mrs Everitt for more details.
