Having recently posted a creative writing resource for this Year’s ‘Vision’ themed National Poetry Day using Kubla Khan, and yesterday – unintentionally connected – my Edwin Morgan inspired poem Clear Message, I was reminded of creative writing resources I prepared for NPD in 2016 and its theme ‘Messages’.

Revisiting that work I was reminded I obviously had quite an energetic response to the theme. As ever, the ideas are based around writing List Poems and I do recommend this approach when working with students.

These don’t need a national focus on a theme and I have re-written slightly if any would like to use them now. Help yourselves:

1 Message CW Ideas

2 Text Message List Poem

3 Message to Myself Poem

4 Rescue Me Message List Poem

5 Uncorker of Current Flow Messages in a Bottle Poem

[Inspired by Edwin Morgan’s Message Clear]

Down
and
down

to a sunless delight, a
dome on waves

beneath
believing.

And in the caves
a savage beware of
symphony and song

deep
romantic
chasm
down
and
down

beneath.

And sea.
Ocean.
And sea,

huge fragments,

lifeless.

Drunk on
the milk of hills

O

O so drunk
now that sunny dome

O
cean

of sinuous rills.

Fertile ground
girdled round

with its poetic
decree:

to such a deep
I revive to
poesy.

This year’s UK National Poetry Day is on the 1^st October. Its theme is Vision.

It might seem so, but it’s never too early to start thinking about and planning for this. I have two reasons for doing so now.

First

As a teacher/writer, I prepare creative writing ideas and resources for this every year, free to use. Years ago these appeared via Teachit but I now promote and provide through this blog.

In practical terms, now is the time to review and select resources rather than in the opening weeks of a busy and new September school year and with the event to take place on that first day of October!

This said, you might wait for a dedicated focus in the summer term, and I will be re-posting around that time too.

Second

As a member of the Coleridge Memorial Trust and the writer/promoter of its Crowdfunder campaign for a memorial statue of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I am compelled – for all the right reasons – to promote STC’s poem Kubla Khan as an ideal resource for this year’s theme.

As our Crowdfunder campaign is launching on the 21^st March, STC looms large in my daily thinking and activity. With a NPD theme of Vision, all of the Romantic poets – especially the visionary William Blake – should be rich resources. Coleridge’s poem takes pride of place for me because of reasons just mentioned, but also for its opening inscription

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment

At the end of this introduction, you will find free-to-download pdf resources based on Kubla Khan. My view of National Poetry Day is that it’s always about creative writing more than anything else. Not study. Reading poetry too, but not analysing it.

Final Observation [but you can go straight to the resources!]

In preparing the Coleridge Memorial Statue Crowdfunder campaign, my thoughts on fundraising at a time of austerity and widespread personal needs have wrestled with this context: statue need vs social need.

Though some CMT members may share opinions on what follows, I stress I am speaking personally here.

I can’t tackle social need as I’d like, though I had views on how a recent national election could address.

However, I can have an impact – hopefully – on the place and celebration of the Arts in our lives/communities today, this also impacted by austerity, but also the ideologies behind this and other aspects of legislated life.

My continued and active support for the Coleridge Memorial Statue is as one kind of declaration that Art and artistic thought matters, that the Romantic vision of radical thoughts and feelings can matter in a world otherwise prescriptive and narrowed, and that contemporary attacks on the Arts – especially in education – must be resisted.

Coleridge’s heritage as the legacy from a great writer and thinker matters in all of this.

In the days of Cummings, Gove & Co. making plans to revamp for a 2015 GCSE English Literature curriculum – now in dreadful, legislated existence – there was an ironic move to make the study of The Romantic Poets compulsory.

This wasn’t in support of the radical, creative, visionary and other counter-establishment elements which could be found in that Movement. This was because of a myopic/arrogant view of a ‘Golden Age’ of education, long-gone in whatever dubious value it had and now a Hirschian [E.D. Hirsch] inspired acquisition of Knowledge: these are Romantic poets – Know them [no understanding/appreciation necessary].

A colleague and I led the fight against this narrow and compulsory idea of study, and won! The only thing that was won against the English curriculum we now have.

We do know that since the introduction of the 2015 GCSE English Literature curriculum [and the whole GCSE curriculum] Arts subjects have been squeezed. Arts subjects in schools have disappeared. Take-up of A Level English has dramatically declined. As a former English teacher, this matters to me.

National Poetry Day is a brilliant annual antidote to this kind of government inspired cultural diminution.

A Samuel Taylor Coleridge memorial statue is another permanent statement in favour of celebrating art and culture and a creative heritage.

The Resources

1 A Vision in a Dream

2 A Vision in a Dream – TN

3 Kubla Khan poem

4 Kubla Khan images

5 Two Kubla Khan Videos

[images by artist and photographer Nick Dormand]

So sad when someone asks
‘Why exist?’
and this is where
one is abstract:

ideas lead to deceiving for
societal and controlling truths.
One is one more tag than
that one, and the lame position

is somewhat like life.
We are poetry
and language is too, writing and
putting it on a desire.

That meaning shouldn’t explain
comfort zones for storytelling
is an argument about need,
the horrors imposed on quite

shallow pleasures.
Others, reading it, find their catalyst
in belief, whether it is yada yada yada
or a shorthand view.

But we have lost sight
of the poetic discussion
and if this is the last one, the one I write,
there’s no need to abhor what isn’t.

On the fundamentalist disposition,
almost apologetic,
love isn’t poetry.

Is music?
Or the visual to find our oblique
yangs?

Try fun, family and friendship
for purposeful lives
and perceptions of this

or when a positive comment burns off
matter, this
untenable escape of a word.

And in informs, i.
In informs,
i.E.

That is, I’m actually ‘poetry’
meaning I can, like,
I can like!

Make it mystify referring to a lovely word
like
atheist

and: do not exist to end death.
Language, in reality,
takes atheism positions.

Therefore, how a theism became the narrative is what
mystifies, found there in the
shifts,

a reverse in the figuring out of words
word
love

when we don’t know how to communicate.
But the discursive truth
cannot know consciousness.

Words, intended meaning –
their own accord
sounding intentionally experimental,

and we meet shape to be respectful,
emotionally, and that is
space pressing for a finite disposition.

soothe, pacify, terrify
and again

meaninglessly engaged
of course

discovering art is poetry
but the text anew

is as a process
language just a collection

of the composed
to suggest form

in‘form’ing
especially the boundaries

and in-form-ation
chopping

to make it of life
yes, experimental

lost or buried
too much: alive

like imagination
it pushes for interest

the complete chaos of
meaning and purpose