Poems for…the wall offers a large selection of poem-posters for public display, free of charge. You can download all of the poems from this website, either individually or in a group. They look good on the walls of school classrooms, healthcare waiting rooms, libraries, etc – either in hard copy or on digital display screen.
The project is based in the UK, but poets from all over the world are represented in its collections, especially in the largest one, called “Poems for…one world,” most of whose poems are bilingual. Fifty different languages are represented there. The late poet David Hart had this to say about the collection : ‘We have the chance here to open people’s lives to each other.’ Here below is an example of how the poems look. It is one of several Hindi poems chosen for the collection. But whatever the language, how the poems are set out stays essentially the same.
Once downloaded, the poems can be enlarged to pretty well any size and onto a wide range of materials. Here is a link to an exhibition of the bilingual poems in Clifton Cathedral (Bristol) in 2019. In this case, the poems were printed onto foamex paperboard. (Click on the first picture and it will enlarge. The arrow on the right will take you through the remainder).
Poems for…the wall was supported initially by the UK Poetry Society and then and consistently by the UK Arts Council. You can see the names of the project’s other funders over the years along the base of this home page.
When it first began, the project was called Poems for the waiting room. It adopted its later title of Poems for…the wall in 2017, to coincide with the project’s 20th birthday and its move to the present website.
All the poems available here have been carefully chosen for quality and subject matter. Copyright clearance has been granted in all relevant cases, on condition that source books and publishers are identified in each relevant case (they are) and no one makes commercial use of the poems.
The menu bar along the top of this page will lead you to more detailed information – the different collections, how to access the poems, how the project developed, where the poems have gone, etc (see “About Us”).
Poems for…the wall is one of several ideas and initiatives promoted by the charity Hyphen-21.
The founder and Director of both Hyphen-21 and Poems for…the wall is Rogan Wolf, who did the writing for this site. For Rogan Wolf’s blog, go to https://roganwolf.com