It is a fine and wonderful thing that, thanks to the Forward Arts Foundation, we now celebrate National Poetry Day. When I was teaching, I made full use of all the poster poems, postcards, teaching materials and websites which are available. I would encourage colleagues to include poetry in their lessons that day, and a wide range of departments would oblige. Everyone in the English department would do a poetry lesson. I would plan and give resources for the Key stage 3 one. I would run an annual competition (which I believe is still going) using the same theme, resulting in a school Poet Laureate. This fed into the Wirral Young Poet Laureate (which was started later), and the very first one was Holly Green, who won our school competition. She went on to read with Carol Ann Duffy – whose generous support of poet laureates everywhere is notable.
As…