2008 – Poems for…the wall

06Nov 2008 by joew

Bilingual Poetry Reading at the Royal Brompton Hospital

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A bilingual poetry reading took place on November 6th in the main reception area of the Royal Brompton Hospital in South Kensington, London. The event was organised jointly with Victoria Hume of RB&H Arts and was opened by Dr Mark Rigby, one of the hospital staff. Then a large, appreciative and lively audience, mainly composed of hospital staff, heard poems read in Arabic, Hindi, Persian, Punjabi, Somali and Turkish. Poets taking part included Debjani Chatterjee MBE, Mevlut Ceylan, Shadab Vajdi, Amarjit Chandan and Abdullahi Bootaan Hasan. Amjad Taha read a poem by Mourid Barghouti and an excerpt from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, both Palestinian poets. Each short poem was followed by its English version, read in several cases by hospital staff. Chris Meade and Stephen Watts also read. Chris…

Poet Laureate launches new website

Andrew Motion

Andrew Motion reading at the Nehru Centre Inauguration. The Poet Laureate Andrew Motion launched this web-site on April 22nd in London. The site allows people to down-load and print for themselves the 145 poem-posters we've put together so far. Future collections will also be displayed on the site as soon as they’ve been completed. The launch took place at the Nehru Centre, near Hyde Park Corner. The Centre was founded by the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and is part of the work of the Indian Embassy. Its purpose is to strengthen Anglo-Indian understanding, chiefly through the arts. Eighteen of the project's bilingual poems were exhibited at the launch, many of them by poets from south Asia. The posters were enlarged to A2 size especially for the event and remained on…

“Please Take a Seat – you’ll be seen shortly”

Poems for...the waiting room

In 1999, the poet David Hart was asked by the Arts Council to commission 50 short poems about waiting, as part of the “Poems for…” collection. The fifty poets included well-known poets such as Andrew Motion the Poet Laureate and Carol Ann Duffy – as well as poets still largely unknown outside their own circles. The poems were then printed as small posters and displayed in healthcare waiting rooms all around the country. These days they are also being displayed in schools and libraries and can be downloaded from this site. David has now written about that experience of eight years ago, and you can read his reflections here.