National Poetry Month - International Recurring Celebrations

International Recurring Celebrations

Since 1999, National Poetry Month has been celebrated each April in Canada, where it is sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets and organized around a different annual theme.

In the United Kingdom the festival “October is National Poetry Month” was founded in 2000 by Celtic bard Jim MacCool and was adopted by the Birmingham-based Performance Poetry Society that same year. From makeshift beginnings, National Poetry Month has been exploited by primary and secondary schools, colleges of further education, public library services, the prison estate, and to a lesser extent, more localised festivals. Professional poets appear in all corners of the United Kingdom under the aegis of the Performance Poetry Society, which co-ordinates a proportion of their efforts and ensures that they are paid a normal rate for their appearances.

National Poetry Day, founded in 1994 by William Sieghart is celebrated on the first Thursday of October in the United Kingdom; this has become an established fixture in the cultural calendar. Events take place in schools, pubs, arts centres, bookshops, libraries, buses, trains and Women’s Institutes, and the day is the focus for media attention for poetry. The Forward Arts Foundation (a registered charity) was set up in 1995 to administer the Forward Prizes and National Poetry Day.

On October 8, 2009, the BBC announced on National Poetry Day the results of its poll to find the nations favourite poet. The winner was T. S. Eliot, followed by John Donne, Benjamin Zephaniah, Wilfred Owen and Philip Larkin (in that order). It has been organized since 1994 by the Poetry Society in the United Kingdom, which chooses a different theme each year to highlight particular poets and styles of poetry.

In 1999, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) declared March 21 to be World Poetry Day. The purpose of the day is to promote the reading, writing, publishing and teaching of poetry throughout the world and, as the UNESCO session declaring the day says, to "give fresh recognition and impetus to national, regional and international poetry movements."