National Poetry Day’s theme this year is light. As a National Poetry Day ambassador, charged with igniting enthusiasm for all things poetic, this sparked many ideas to celebrate the day.
Together with my husband Peter, a freelance film editor, I decided to film people whose lives are involved some way in light reading poems about light.
I also planned to send “beams” of poems about light on bright yellow bunting through a local bookstore in Bristol – and asked both adult and children’s poets if they could send me poems to start us off.
Poets are generous beings. I was soon in possession of 160 poems. Some of them lent themselves brilliantly to being read by the equally generous people who volunteered to be filmed.
Some volunteers were easy to find – Bristol University physics department gave us six willing scientists all working in some way with light – I decided on Dr Furqaan Yusaf, who was, I was told, working with data from gravitational lensing. He what? Yes, I had to read up what it was about. And as there were no poems I could find on this subject, write one. That was tricky.
Finding a firefighter willing to read a poem was not the easiest task, either. You’d have thought Avon Fire and Rescue headquarter’s telephones were mysteriously alight the way I was passed from section to section – but in the end, we found a firefighter braver than all the rest.
We ended up with 14 films, including a person in a lighting department, a priest, a Hindu performer and an exciting fire performer.
We also took our camera onto the streets of Bristol and asked passing children and adults to read poems for us, to make three poem mashes.
Virtually everyone agreed to read, and they all read brilliantly – the spirit of poetry, it seems, is still alight in the hearts of people everywhere!
Watch all Liz Brownlee’s light poem films on her YouTube channel and find out more on her website and blog.
