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Poetry For A Change – First Ever National Poetry Day Anthology

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The first ever official National Poetry Day anthology, Poetry For a Change, is packed with an exciting variety of poems for children by a top team of fantastic poets, including the National Poetry Day Ambassadors, who bring poetry alive all year round.

It includes new poems by Deborah Alma, Joseph Coelho, Sally Crabtree, Jan Dean, Marjorie Lotfi Gill, Chrissie Gittins, Matt Goodfellow, Sophie Herxheimer, Michaela Morgan, Brian Moses, Abigail Parry, Rachel Piercey, Rachel Rooney, Joshua Siegal and Kate Wakeling (winner of the CLiPPA, 2017).

Each featured poet has also chosen a favourite poem to share, providing readers the chance to (re-) discover works by Lola Ridge, Christina Rossetti, W.B. Yeats, Shakespeare and Paul Laurence Dunbar among others at the same time as discovering new and inspirational poems.

All 1000 plus people performing at or attending the award show for the 2018 CLiPPA (Centre of Literacy in Primary Poetry Award) at the National Theatre on 22nd June will receive a free advance copy of the anthology, donated by CLPE, who have also created resources for the book.
 
Janetta Otter-Barry, publisher at Otter-Barry Books, says, “We are proud to publish the National Poetry Day Anthology for 2018, Poetry For a Change, and it’s been a huge pleasure to work with the team at the Forward Arts Foundation to bring this about. I love the way the twenty-one  poets have combined a new poem with one of their favourite classic poems and that they’ve all written personal messages to the reader to go with the verses. This is a unique and exciting collection to celebrate National Poetry Day, with beautiful illustrations by Chie Hosaka.“

Closing Date Nears For Poetry Illustration Prize

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CLOSING: 9am GMT on Friday 1st June 2018

 

In partnership with the House of Illustration and the Betjeman Poetry Prize, Lauren Child, Waterstones Children’s Laureate 2017-2019, announces an international illustration competition:

  • An international illustration prize for illustrators aged 18- 25 years

  • Illustrate a poem by a Betjeman Poetry Prize finalist

  • £1000 first prize, plus prizes for commended illustrators

  • Top 12 illustrators will be commissioned to create further work to be exhibited at St Pancras International station, London, in September 2018

  • Judges: Lauren Child, award-winning author and illustrator; director of the House of Illustration Colin McKenzie and Imtiaz Dharker, Queen’s Gold Medal winning poet and artist

  • Competition opens February 1st 2018 and closes 9am GMT on Friday June 1st 2018

 

 

HOW TO ENTER

  1. Create an illustration for one poem of your choice from the 12 poems listed HERE
     

  2. Each illustration entered must be accompanied by the poem title
     

  3. We require full-page illustrations in black and white. Do not illustrate around the words. The illustrations can be in any medium suitable for reproduction. However, all entries must be appropriate for the dimensions given here: Your illustrations can either bleed off the page or be surrounded by a white border for a trimmed page size of 210 x 297mm (A4)
     

  4. Original artwork should not be submitted. You should submit your illustration at 150 dpi, Greyscale, JPEG (jpeg setting 8). If you are shortlisted, we will contact you for the master artwork. Master artwork must be a 300dpi Greyscale TIFF
     

  5. To enter, email your artwork as an attachment to . In the body of the email you should give your name, age, address and a contact telephone number. You MUST state to which poem your illustration corresponds
     

  6. Pay your entry fee of £15 by PayPal HERE. The email used for the PayPal payment MUST be the same used to send your illustration
     

  7. Your entry will be confirmed by email once we have received both your payment and your illustration. Original artwork sent by post will not be considered
     

  8. Artists may enter more than once with a separate entry fee for each illustration
     

  9. The 12 winning illustrators will be commissioned to create a fresh illustration for the Lauren Child Poetry Illustration Prize exhibition of poems and winning illustrations to be held on the Upper Concourse at St Pancras International, London in September 2018
     

  10. Read the terms and conditions HERE
     

  11. Any problems, email
     

  12. The final deadline for entries to the competition is 9am GMT on Friday 1st June 2018

CLiPPA 2018 Shortlist Announced

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Congratulations to indie Otter-Barry Books, publisher of half the books on this years CLiPPA shortlist, announced by CLPE today.

Established in 2003, the CLiPPA encourages and celebrates outstanding poetry published for children.

The shortlist is evenly split between 3 previous winners and 3 debut collections, with 3 out of the 6 shortlisted books coming from independent publisher Otter-Barry Books.

Louise Johns-Shepherd, Chief Executive, CLPE said “CLiPPA is leading an essential movement to build on the current huge popularity of poetry and the growing poetry market to ensure that poetry for children is acknowledged as an essential part of this landscape. The shortlist recognises not just great children’s poets but great poets full stop. We want as many people as possible to know about these wonderful works and CLiPPA, the Shadowing Scheme and the resources we produce all come together to make sure that they receive the high profile they deserve.”

This year there was an increase in submissions of almost 70%, from 19 books from 9 publishers in 2017 to 32 books from 19 publishers in 2018.

The full shortlist is:

  • John Agard: The Rainmaker Danced, illustrated by Satoshi Kitamura, Hodder – witty and satirical poems that focus on social observations, play with myths and traditional tales and reflect on the nature of humanity
  • Ruth Awolola, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Abigail Cook, Jay Hulme, Amina Jama: Rising Stars, Otter-Barry Books, illustrated by Riya Chowdhury, Elanor Chuah and Joe Manners – a showcase for five fresh and exciting emerging writer-performers
  • Joseph Coelho: Overheard in a Tower Block, illustrated by Kate Milner, Otter-Barry Books – a powerful collection, offering glimpses into the challenges of a boy’s life, ingeniously threaded through with fantasy, story,myth and magic
  • Sarah Crossan: Moonrise, Bloomsbury – a moving verse novel for young adults, seen from the viewpoint of a young man whose brother is on death row
  • Sue Hardy-Dawson: Where Zebras Go, Otter-Barry Books – a first solo collection uniting a variety of voices with a wide range of poetic forms
  • Karl Nova: Rhythm and Poetry, illustrated by Joseph Witchall, Caboodle Books – the first published collection from a Hip Hop poet, demonstrating the currency and significance of rap as a form, especially for young people

The judging panel, chaired by CLiPPA 2003 winner, Grace Nichols, included Kate Wakeling, poet and CLiPPA 2017 winner for Moon Juice; Imogen Lycett Green, Director of the Betjeman Prize for Young Poet; Charlotte Hacking, CLPE Learning Programme Leader; and Anthony Anaxagorou, poet, poetry educator and founder of Out-Spoken Press.

The winner of the 2018 Award will be announced on 22nd June in the Olivier Theatre at the National Theatre in London. This will be the 4th year that CLPE has partnered with the National Theatre to deliver the Poetry Show which will include performances from children participating in the Shadowing Scheme and the shortlisted poets.

The winning poet receives £1000.

The free Shadowing Scheme to involve schools in the Poetry Award 2018 is launched alongside the announcement of the shortlist. The scheme has run for 3 years, reaching more than 600 teachers and 14,000 children.

To support schools to take poetry into the classroom, videos of poets performing from the shortlisted books and talking about their work and high quality teaching resources,
are available free of charge to all schools www.clpe.org.uk/poetryline. Shadowing schools are invited to apply for free tickets to attend the Award Ceremony.

New for 2018: CLPE will be partnering with ALCS (Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society) to educate teachers and children about copyright and about the rights of writers.

CLiPPA Shadowing Is Now Open

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This is a fantastic opportunity. Can’t recommend it highly enough.The resources produced by the CLPE are always superb.

Bring poetry to life in your class with free resources and win the chance to perform at the National Theatre!

CLPE are running the 4th schools shadowing scheme alongside CLiPPA 2018, the only award for published children’s poetry in the UK.  

Primary schools from the UK and beyond are invited to take part. All of the planning is done as CLPE provides complete teaching sequences for EYFS to KS2 so that you can focus on getting your children to read, write and perform poetry over a 3 week period, a perfect post-SATs activity. Films of the shortlisted poets performing and giving writing tips will also be available.

Shadowing Scheme Schools can also apply for exclusive free class tickets to the Poetry Show and Winner Announcement at the National Theatre, London on 22 June 2018, where they can watch poets and children perform live.

It’s easy to take part:

  • The scheme is free but you’ll need to purchase the shortlisted books. Details on purchasing a discounted set will be shared in April
  • Look out for the announcement of the CLiPPA 2018 shortlist and release of the teaching resources on 26 April 
  • Use these resources to inspire your class and create a poetry classroom for up to 3 weeks 
  • If you wish, send us videos of your children performing from the shortlisted books as individuals, groups or as a class no later than 9am on 7 June 
  • 5 winning groups will be picked to perform at the Award Ceremony at the National Theatre, participate in performance workshops and meet the shortlisted poets. All participating schools will receive a certificate

Tiny Owl To Publish Winner Of Coretta Scott King–Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement

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Regularly published and awarded in America since the 1970s, Eloise Greenfield is little known in the UK. That’s about to change. In April Tiny Owl will be publishing Thinker: My Puppy Poet And Me. The African-American author’s poetry collection will be illustrated by Iranian artist Ehsan Abdollahi. The title is part of the publisher’s wider programme of promoting under-represented voices and cultures in literature.

Eloise Greenfield has written 47 books for children in a career spanning nearly 60 years. She is known for her focus on positive portrayals of black culture and family life and was recently awarded the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement. This prestigious award celebrates an African American author or illustrator who has made a significant and lasting contribution to literature.

The book will be published in April.

New Young Voices In Poetry #5 – AMINA JAMA

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A sequence of short features focusing on the five individual young poets included in the recently-launched collection Rising Stars published by Otter-Barry Books.

Boorn in 1997 and raised in East London, Amina Jama is a Somali-British writer and member of the Barbican Young Poets collective. She has had worked published by the Sula Collective, an online magazine ‘for and by people of colour’.

There are several examples of her spoken word poetry on YouTube, including this powerful piece performed for an adult audience.

‘The House At The End Of The Street’ is one of the best poems in the Rising Stars collection

One of the ironies of an anthology of poets known for their spoken word work is that it contains so many poems that do not rely on performance for their impact. This may be because the poets’ performed poetry is usually more adult in theme. Whatever the reason, ‘The House At The End Of The Street’, about a best friend moving home, is one such example of a poem that has full adequacy as printed words on a page.

Written in rhyming couplets it is lightly descriptive in a manner that belies the emotion behind it.

Leila was my best friend since Year Two.
For years we got each other through.

I was there when her dad left her mum,
I plaited her hair and stroked her heart until she was numb.

Now she was moving out from her house at the end of the street
and another kid would come into class and take her seat.

I also like the ambiguity at the start of the poem. Why are there ‘officers and firemen going in and out’? What of the ‘distant burnt smell’?

There is a welcome sense of humour in ‘Car Ride’, a poem about a father who always gets the words to songs wrong:

He would sing, ‘The Grand Old Duke of Pork…’
‘No, Dad!’ we’d scream. “It’s York!.”

No matter how many times we’d tell him
that there was no Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Fart,
and the song was not Row, Row, Row Your Goat…

Links to pieces about the other poets in the collection:

New Young Voices In Poetry #4 – JAY HULME

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A sequence of short features focusing on the five individual young poets included in the recently-launched collection Rising Stars published by Otter-Barry Books.

Jay Hulme is a young transgender performance poet from Leicester, now based in Bristol. Another SLAMbassadors 2015 winner, he has already self-published two solo collections and has been featured in various anthologies. He also publishes on Tumblr and has recently established a Patreon page, primarily to help him offer his services for free to disadvantaged schools, libraries, and charities.

This poem about being transgender is not included in Rising Stars.

Last year he was featured in a DAZE item on up-and-coming spoken word artists:

Hulme talks about a range of topics, from life in the Midlands to his first week experiences at university. Hulme’s poem I am a man is a personal address as a transgender man to the problems that transgender people come up against every day. Ranging from pronoun mix-ups to death threats, Hulme’s frank spoken word performance, which is both touching and educational, is refreshing. Hulme shows just how important spoken word is to the new generation of people using the genre to address personal issues and share them with a wider audience.

Hulme’s style is direct and uncomplicated. Young readers will not struggle to understand any of his poems. The first of his eight poems included in Rising Stars, titled ‘Community’ with a knowing irony, describes growing up in an anonymous neighbourhood that will be recognisable by many people living in the suburbs.

We were told somebody started
a Neighbourhood Watch,
but I never met anyone
I know for sure was a neighbour.
we were all just figures, behind net curtains.

In the winters I’d walk the dog round the block,
hood up, head down, letting the world pass me by.

This is a moment to mention that the book has three different illustrators; Riya Chowdhury, Eleanor Chuah and Joe Manners. The latter is Hulme’s illustrator and I love the way he has interpreted this opening poem.

Hulme is particularly good at beginning with a prosaic everyday sensations then building it into a poetic one using simple techniques such as repetition and word pattern. ‘I Thought I Was Small’ begins

I thought I was small
when I first went to London

and ends

When I didn’t notice the heart
built into my body.
When I didn’t notice the universe
held within my soul.
I thought I was small.

Manners’ illustration for this poem is another particularly good one.

‘New Words’ is rhythmic and rhyming in a very self-assured way, and ‘Sunset at Brean Down’  is a lyric of beautiful timelessness

We walked on the shoreline,
My old dog and me,
Our feet being rushed
By the rippling sea.

The whole poem is very well done.

Hulme’s contribution to the collection ends with the thought-provoking ‘The Border’, about a walk with the ghosts from the past.

I wished they’d teach me
what stands before me, what types of mystery lie ahead.
But they stay silent. I forgive the
secrets guarded by the dead.

This is again very fine. I love the enjambment in the final two lines.

For features on the other Rising Stars poets see:

Ruth Awolola
Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Abigail Cook

 

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New Young Voices In Poetry #3 – ABIGAIL COOK

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A sequence of short features focusing on the five individual young poets included in the recently-launched collection Rising Stars published by Otter-Barry Books.

Abigail Cook is a SLAMbassadors-winning performance poet from London, and currently a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

The opening poem in Abigail’s section of Rising Stars:

Some of Cook’s other spoken (and sung) work can be found on Soundcloud.

As that opening poem suggests (‘My body is the garden I grew up in’ … ‘My hair is the ocean’… ‘My shoulders are bird’s wings’) Cook’s poetry is rich in metaphor.

‘Storm of a Girl’ begins

I have two storms inside me
I call them my mother and father.

Whereas much young writing in this style can be overly abstract and lacking in concrete detail, Cook conjures up the experience of adolescence extremely vividly – especially those first times of being away from (but still close by) the family home, staying up late under starry skies. 

In the second poem, ‘Brother’

One night
we lay on the driveway
and counted every star
in the sky
plucked them and placed them in our pockets
there to light the way for the darkness ahead

Again, on ‘Night-time in the garden’

We wash ourselves in raindrops
sleep covered in leaves,
count every star in the sky,
watch the world go by.

Cook’s final poem ‘Summer Day’ is her strongest, perfectly capturing that best of all coming-of-age sensations: a powerful sense of benign, innocently-equipped omnipotence.

The summer was long and hot.
We sat outside in our pyjamas
whilst the world ended.

…

We spoke as if the sun would never rise again.
We spoke with laughter dripping from our lips,
trying to be braver,
and decided we would save the world.
With sticks as our swords
and sharpened ends
we saved the day
again.

Posts about the other poets in the collection will follow shortly.
Ruth Awolola
Victoria Adukwei Bulley
 

 

 

New Young Voices In Poetry #2 – VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY

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A sequence of short features focusing on the five individual young poets included in the recently-launched collection Rising Stars published by Otter-Barry Books.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley, born in 1991, is a British-Ghanaian poet, writer and film-maker, living in London. She is a former Barbican Young Poet and has had worked commissioned by the Royal Academy of Arts. Her debut pamphlet, Girl B, is part of the 2017 New-generation African Poets series.

She is the director of Mother Tongues, an intergenerational poetry, film and translation project.

Interviewed recently by Dandano, a community project aimed at analyzing, documenting and archiving African film and music, Bulley described the project’s procedure: “A poet asks her mother to write a translation of a poem, the mother agrees and does so. Then, the two are filmed at a studio in intimate conversation, followed by the mother reciting the translation, with the original poem recited by the daughter.”

She went on

The project was borne out of a need to connect with the language that I’ve heard around me since birth, yet cannot understand. In my case, that language is Ga, spoken by the people most historically based around Accra, in Ghana. I have a deep love for indigenous cultures, and languages are the entry point into these. I also have a feeling of disconnection and limitedness, knowing that I can only really speak English. The fact that lesser-spoken languages are rapidly declining in usage is one that makes me intensely sad. MOTHER TONGUES, for me, is one small and meaningful attempt to restore and reconnect what is at risk of being lost or neglected.

Central to Bulley’s section in Rising Stars is a powerful prose poem, ‘This Poem Is Not About Parakeets’. A young woman is on a bus. Two men are mouthing off about immigrants. Saying things like, “They take up all the housing” and “They’re scroungers”. She has seven stops to travel. In her mind, as a means of blanking out the anger and prejudice, she thinks of parakeets…

I want to tell the men how the parakeets got here. All they do is take our jobs. How they were brought here in the 60s for a film, and then escaped. They’re scroungers. I want to tell them how despite the bad weather they never lost their sings. Why are they so noisy? How none of April’s showers ever washed their colours off. They don’t even try to blend in.
 

Elsewhere Bulley shows her versatility as a poet. There is a clever villanelle about the cat Toby killing a bird, which begins

Toby killed the bird at first light,
left the hallway dashed with feathers:
a fraction of a pillow fight.

Before we woke up, after night,
and hoovered up the snowy weather,
Toby killed the bird at first light.

As a photographer who loves taking portraits of people with big curly hair, I especially enjoyed the ‘Afro Hair Haiku’ sequence…

I used to harm it,
force it down, flat and lifeless –
a ghost of itself.

Now I let it grow
the way it wants to grow:
confident again.

‘Strange Dusts’ is a poem about African sands being blown into European skies and falling as ‘pollution’

air is indiscriminate
and wind knows
no such thing
as nations

Posts about the other poets in the collection will follow shortly.
Ruth Awolola

 

New Young Voices In Poetry #1 – RUTH AWOLOLA

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A sequence of short features focusing on the five individual young poets included in the recently-launched collection Rising Stars published by Otter-Barry Books.

Ruth Awolola was born in 1998 and has been writing since 2015, when she was a winner of the SLAMbassadors UK national youth slam.

Hear her perform ‘Sorry’ the piece that impressed judges Anthony Anaxagorou and Joelle Taylor:

Earlier this month Awolola explained how she had become a poet…

Ten years ago, I remember it being World Book Day. This was the highlight of my academic year for several reasons: the book fair came to the school; we didn’t have maths lessons; and we were encouraged to go into school dressed as our favourite book characters. My brother however, who preferred running to reading, was not as enthused about the event. Two years earlier, before I joined the school, he had chosen to go as Kipper from the Biff, Chip and Kipper series. He returned home feeling defeated that day as a teaching assistant had told him he didn’t look like Kipper because Kipper wasn’t black. Every year after this he wore his latest football kit to school and cited he was a character from a book about sport that I knew he had never read. I was angry at him for not putting in any effort, sure that if he had read enough he would have found a character that looked like him. It wasn’t until I was eight years old and, despite having spent all my free time reading, couldn’t think of a black character I liked enough to dress up as, that I realised my brother wasn’t the problem.

I still struggle to think of many books with black protagonists and I assumed this was because there weren’t enough black writers. This played a role in why I initially found it so hard to start identifying myself as a poet. So few of the writers I was being encouraged to read or that we studied in class looked like me and so I developed a complex that I could not be one. It wasn’t until I was welcomed to the poetry community that I saw how diverse it really was and I met poets from all around the world. I found poetry that addressed issues I related to and I started to connect to writing more than I ever had before. I couldn’t help thinking, why couldn’t I have found this sooner?
https://mediadiversified.org/2017/11/03/how-i-became-a-poet-ruth-awolola/

Awolola’s younger bother is the subject of ‘Superpowers’, the second of her eight poems included in Rising Stars.

My littler brother loves superheroes.
He wants to change the world,
get the keys to the city and save the girl.

A couple of the poems ruminate about the vastness of space. In ‘Mainly About Aliens’

I’m looking up into the sky
And I’m thinking why is it so big?

An in ‘Love Letter To The Stars’

There are things I hate about space,
It’s far too big and unknown.
But it is my safe place,
I long to call it home.

In the biographical piece quoted from earlier Awolola confesses, “I was initially daunted about writing for a younger audience as I hadn’t really written to a brief before. The best advice I received, which applies to all writing, is to write about what concerns you. There’s no use trying to produce something that relates to people if it doesn’t relate to you. I had to remember that the person I was five years ago was still me, with similar interests and concerns.”

She has done this very well. The poems are accessible and simply worded, yet they speak of the big things that children, as they reach nine or ten years old, contemplate with such receptive minds. The longest poem – ‘On Forgetting That I am A Tree’ – is a fabulous work of empathetic imagination. Picture a teacher suggesting to his or her class, “I want you to write a poem in which you pretend you are a tree,” and receiving this in response!

Near the beginning it goes

A poem in which I fear I did not dig into the past,
Did not think about my roots,
Forgot what it meant to be planted.

A poem in which I realise they may try to cut me down,
That I must change with the seasons,
That I do it so well
It looks as if they are changing with me.

And ends

A poem in which I stop looking for it,
Because I am home.
I am habitat.
My branches are host and shelter.
I am life-giver and fruit-bearer.
Self-sufficient protection.

A poem in which I remember I am a tree.

Posts about the other poets in the collection will follow shortly.