Today is World Poetry Day 2021, a global event to encourage the teaching, reading and writing of poetry and celebrate poets across the world.
UNESCO declared March 21 as World Poetry Day in 1999. Their aim was to support linguistic diversity through poetic expression.
To mark the event, poets from across Merseyside have given their own meaning to poetry.
Eleanor Rees
“Poetry is a way of changing shape and shifting into the flow of energies in the world around us. Through connecting with the flux of the natural world, poets can sense new possibilities and articulate potential futures.”
Levi Tafari
“To me poetry means being in touch with mind, body and soul. Freedom, self awareness and communication.”
Chris McCabe
“Poetry is a means of contact with the world, a movement from a background to the foreground, where excitement and growth can take place.”
Gerry Potter
“Poetry has an almost alchemical literary linguistic ability to not only rearrange meaning but ours and other’s language. It means, with words, we with an imaginative/anarchic bent can bend what/who/why we are. In many ways rearrange and re-represent ourselves. Like dance, poetry’s an art-form allowing us a world shaping malleability. I believe our history’s defined by dance, poetry and poets.”
Pictures courtesy of Chuttersnap (1) and Tom Hermans (2) on Unsplash.
