Ian McMillan's National Poetry Day

Well, now the dust has settled on National Poetry Day, let's have a look around and see what's actually happened. My NPD started early, a trip at 06.15 to BBC Radio Sheffield to do twelve live interviews with BBC local radio stations over a couple of hours, all of which were celebrating NPD in their own way: some of them had listeners sending in poems, some of them had started a poem and wanted the listeners to carry it on, some were discussing what poetry is and how it applies to our lives at the busy end of a decade.

What I got from the experience, as I always do, is a sense that people in this country love poetry, and that they'll talk about it and recite it and write it at the drop of a hat. Then I wandered around Sheffield for a while and went back to the studio at 11.00 to record interviews with the winners of this year's Forward Prizes for Best Poetry Collection and Best First Collection, Don Paterson and Emma Jones; Don's book Rain is a truly accomplished work, full of poems of love and family and ringing with a mysterious quality that resonates long after you've put 'em down. Emma is a young Australian writer whose work is full of water and wildlife and is often about the idea of trying to take on Australian history and her own personal history.

Afterwards, on the train back to Barnsley, I reflected on the fact that I'm indiscriminate: I love the kind of rhyming ditties that people were ringing in to the local radio stations, and I love the carefully crafted work of writers like Paterson and Jones.



Maybe my favourite kind of writing, however, is the dense, allusive, difficult and knotty poetry of the ignored gang of British avant-garde writers like Bill Griffiths, Denise Riley, Maggie O'Sullivan and too many more to mention. On the train I read the first issue of a new magazine, the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, and it made me ridiculously happy...

And I reckon all these poetries can live together. But I realise I'm probably in a minority of one. Look forward to seeing lots of people who will disagree with me at the Free Thinking Festival in Gateshead!

• For a link to the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, click here.
• Free tickets are available for the Free Thinking Festival: click here.
• You can read Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy's specially written poem for NPD: click here.
• The latest edition of Radio 3's The Verb includes coverage of the Forward Prizes. You can listen again via the iPlayer via The Verb's home page.