National Poetry Day at The Red Room

Next Thursday is National Poetry Day, and The Red Room is delighted to present The Itinerant Poetry Library, an art installation with an international following but close ties to UCL. (Members of the Department of Information Studies may recognise The Librarian’s alter-ego). As always, poetry books are carefully selected around a theme – in this case “stars” (the theme of National Poetry Day this year) and “the colour red” (in tribute to Strindberg).

From The Librarian’s recent interview on the National Poetry Day blog:

This year, we’re delighted to be able to provide another UK-based location for National Poetry Day as part of University College London’s Strindberg celebrations, which see the North Lodge at the entrance to UCL’s main quad transformed into The Red Room (Röda Rummet), named after the title of Strindberg’s most famous novel, in turn named after the salon where he and his friends would meet in fin-de-siècle Stockholm to discuss politics, science, art, and anything else that took their fancy. We’ll be opening up The Itinerant Poetry Library salon-style in The Red Room, and providing (as usual) a collection of especially-themed items for the day, this time informed by the dual influences of NPD’s “star” theme and in honour of Strindberg, “the colour red”. Come along and join us, and get your library on: we’ll be open from 3-6pm on Thursday 4^th October. If you’re a lover of all things library anyway and any-day, then do also come and visit The Red Room on Tuesday October 2^nd, when The Itinerant Poetry Library’s founder will be giving a free talk entitled “The Poetics of the Library: a Talk on Future Visions” from 1:15-1:55pm.

The event is free, and open from 3-6pm, and we hope that as well as providing poetry fun for those in the vicinity, UCL’s central location will make it a convenient stop-off for those en route to or from the celebrations on the Southbank.

The Itinerant Poetry Library at the Red Room and the talk on ‘The Poetics of the Library’ are co-sponsored by the UCL Festival of Reading, of which more details next week.

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Image: The Itinerant Poetry Library

National Poetry Day: Home

[Inter]National Poetry Writing Month

April is National Poetry Month in the United States, and there are various initiatives to celebrate.

Last year some friends over here in the UK took part, in an ad hoc fashion, in National Poetry Writing Month, in which poet Maureen Thorson has challenged other writers to compose a poem a day throughout April.

This year, we’re taking it a bit more seriously, with a closed facebook group to share prompts and responses and most of us so far, are on scheclue. Mind you, we’re only six days in, so there is plenty of room for slippage.