Poetry throughout the day on the BBC, poetry displayed on Blackpool’s illuminations, poets in the spotlight at night on the Southbank, and firefighters and fire-eaters enlisted to help in Bristol will help blaze a trail across the nation as people celebrate the theme of light – or just celebrate - on the 21st National Poetry Day on Thursday 8 October. Throughout the big day on BBC Radio 4, We British: An Epic In Poetry will see Andrew Marr and some of Britain’s most loved poets present readings, archive material interviews and conversations. Presenter and poet Ian McMillan will join BBC Radio3 Breakfast for a special poetry edition, while on Radio 2 Emergency Poet Deborah Alma will be joining Chris Evans as he, Jeremy Vine and Simon Mayo all mark National Poetry Day with special programmes. Radcliffe and Maconie will be joining the celebration on BBC Radio 6 Music with John Cooper Clarke, and Jo Bell. At midday on Radio 4, poet Murray Lachlan Young will read out his own poetic reimagining of the Shipping Forecast, a favourite of poets. Listeners will then have the chance to sum up their mood or activities on National Poetry Day in 10 words or less, using the style of the forecast. Murray Lachlan Young will curate the best submissions into The People’s Shipping Forecast, and read it out live at 6.20pm on the same day. You can find out how to get involved here.

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.

National Poetry Day is co-ordinated by the Forward Arts Foundation, a charity that celebrates poetry and promotes it as part of everyday life. With Macmillan Children’s Books, it has nominated 11 poets as National Poetry Day ambassadors. In Bristol the National Poetry Day ambassador, Liz Brownlee has rounded up the city’s light workers – including an astronomer, a firefighter, a cosmologist, a fire-eater  and many more - to read poems about light for films to be displayed on the Big Screen in the city centre.

Write Out Loud is playing its part, too. At The Old Courts in Wigan, it is hosting the Wigan heat of the Commonword Superheroes of Slam contest. There are 12 contestants, and it all kicks off at 8.30pm.

In Newlyn and Penzance the Poetry Postie (aka Sally Crabtree) will be on her rounds, and may have a poetic parcel or lyrical letter for you.

Kidderminster's Museum of Carpet is hosting Light and Shade, a special performance for National Poetry Day, presented by  Worcestershire’s poet laureate, Heather Wastie, who was writer in residence at the museum in 2013, with Chloe Clarke and Maggie Doyle.

At Aldeburgh Suffolk Poetry Society members will present poems of their own and poems by favourite poets relating to the them of light from the steps of the Aldeburgh Beach Lookout, from 12.30pm to 1.10pm. 

All around the country many libraries will be running events on National Poetry Day. At Retford in Nottinghamshire, a full day of events will conclude with Midlands poet Bert Flitcroft sharing his own poetry as well as his favourite poems on the theme of light.

At Sowerby Bridge library in West Yorkshire local poets Gaia Holmes and Winston Plowes will be hosting a Poetry Buffet all afternoon where they will serve up a selection of bite-sized poetry exercises, with an open mic night later in the upstairs lounge at the Blind Pig just two minutes away. Winston said: “You can just pop into the library for one self-contained 15-minute workshop or stay for the whole four-hour marathon! The evening open mic at The Blind Pig promises to be a special evening. Why not come over to Sowerby Bridge and make a National Poetry Day of it?”

Poet Fiona Ritchie Walker will be at Montrose public library in Angus to present an afternoon of poems on the theme of light. Listen to poems or bring one along – your own or a favourite – to share.

In Bolton, Live From Worktown are organising a poetry workshop with Louise Fazackerley from 11am to 1pm at the Octagon theatre, and a reading with Anne Caldwell and Rose Condo plus open mic in the evening at Bolton Socialist Club, while the touring People’s Republic of Poetry will be at Washington arts centre in the north-east on the big day.  

In Cardiff, from 6-8pm at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, poems will be read in the galleries by Philip Gross, John Freeman, Alison Brackenbury and Alyson Hallett, from the anthology MAP: Poems After William Smith’s Geological Map of 1815, edited by Michael McKimm.

In Armagh public library, from 7.30-9.30pm poets Frank Ormsby and Ruth Carr will talk about and read from their own work.

At London’s Southbank Centre, the Poetry Society is organising National Poetry Day Live, a free event in the Clore Ballroom. This year’s line-up will include readings and performances from John Hegley, Joelle Taylor, Michael Symmons Roberts, Imtiaz Dharker, Francesca Beard, GREEdS, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Liz Berry, RA Villanueva, Patience Agbabi, Rachel Rooney, Joshua Seigal and one of the first public performances by the new Young Poet Laureate of London, who will have been announced the day before the event. The event will also include an art installation from poet and artist Robert Montgomery, which will light up the Clore Ballroom.

Then in the evening at the Southbank, starting at 7.30pm, a new live literature show, Beginning to See the Light, in association with JayBird Live Literature, will see six spot-lit writers trace the course of light through the day. In a series of classic and newly commissioned poems, poets Raymond Antrobus, Malika Booker, Holly Corfield Carr, Jane Draycott, Caleb Klaces and Richard Price will examine what's illuminated and what stays in the shadows. The message is: wear your sunglasses, bring a torch, and follow the poets as they bring the day's discoveries into the light.

And if that's not all ... veteran poet Michael Horovitz, who marked his 80th birthday earlier this year with three days of performances, will be presiding at the annual Poetry Olympics Jazz/Poetry Superjam at the 100 Club in London's Oxford Street.  

 

Find out more about these events and many others on the National Poetry Day’s website – and, of course, on Write Out Loud’s celebrated Gig Guide.