The Write Out Loud team has perhaps been more focused on our 20th anniversary and fundraising poetry competition than the recent World Poetry Day. Mea culpa! 

And yet we consider ourselves internationalist in outlook. Right from our website's launch (May 2005), our logo was the beret-clad figure (pictured below, meant to be me, apparently) of an open-mic reader, created by my Mexican/British daughter-in-law, Claudia, the key feature of which is a sheet of paper containing Neruda's words she thought most appropriate for Write Out Loud: "And it was at that age... Poetry arrived in search of me."

I hadn't heard of Pablo Neruda until then, and was astonished at the aptness of those lines Claudia had chosen, for the work we were doing: helping people who had been writing in secret to now being able to share their words, their deepest thoughts, with others, in small groups or in our newly-created, online, poetry community. 

I soon learned a good deal about Neruda, poet, diplomat and politician, though it's as a poet he was internationally known, eventually being awarded the Nobel prize for literature. It seems almost shameful that we British have known so little about him, whilst in Latin America he was truly a poet of the people, pretty much everyone knowing of him and his work, and most being able to quote a few lines. I have met (in US, Mexico and Cuba) taxi-drivers, hotel staff, shopkeepers ... so many people to whom he is still seen as a poetic hero. They know of his work and repeat with relish their favourite of Neruda's lines. 

Write Out Loud's internationalist instincts were manifest in other projects over the past 20 years, such as our work with community groups of mixed linguistic backgrounds, writing poems then working in small groups to translate (English to Urdu, Urdu to English, ditto Bengali) each others' poems, some being published in Scribble, a local journal. A project then repeated in other northern towns.

Over several years we took groups of poets to Bordeaux for long weekends of sharing our poetry in open mic and other events. Including this one in 2006, when you had to have been there, as Dave Morgan's review so deftly informs us.

As we continue into our 20th year, look out for more on our internationalist leanings and projects. For now, I leave you with the whole of Neruda's poem we quoted from for our original logo/icon.

 

Poetry 

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind. 

Pablo Neruda

From One Hundred Love Sonnets and a Song of Despair (Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada).

 

UNESCO adopted 21 March as World Poetry Day in 1999 with the aim of supporting linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard. World Poetry Day is the occasion to honour poets, revive oral traditions of poetry recitals, promote the reading, writing and teaching of poetry, foster the convergence between poetry and other arts such as theatre, dance, music and painting, and raise the visibility of poetry in the media. As poetry continues to bring people together across continents, all are invited to join in.