Physicist Stephen Hawking and actors Samantha Morton and Sean Bean have joined forces with leading artists to make a series of short films encouraging people to dispense with prose for a day and “make like a poet”.
Organisers of National Poetry Day are hoping to inspire readers to record their own creative responses to poetry, as part of a competition culminating with a display of the winning words, images and videos in the Blackpool Illuminations on Thursday 8 October 2015. This year marks the 21st anniversary of this annual celebration of poetry, with a week-long series of events all over the UK on the theme of light.
In a film created by the artist Bridget Smith, Hawking recites a poem called Relativity, which was written for him by the Forward prize-shortlisted poet Sarah Howe. His synthesised voice counterposes the physical terror of waking “brushed by panic in the dark” with the intellectual power of quantum physics. “They say/ a flash seen from on and off a hurtling train/ will explain why time dilates like a perfect/ afternoon,” he says, asking “If we can think/ this far, might not our eyes adjust to the dark?”
Stephen Hawking reads Relativity by Sarah Howe
Samantha Morton teams up with the Turner prize-winning artist Laure Prouvost for My Brilliant Image by the 14th-century Persian poet Hafez, and Sean Bean reads Dylan Thomas’s Notes on the Art of Poetry in a film made by Kathleen Herbert.
Members of the public are invited to share contributions on the theme of light via social media, using the hashtag #nationalpoetryday. The graphic artist Anthony Burrill will select some of the entries to feature as part of the Blackpool display.
