Based in London, the Royal College of Nursing sends its monthly newsletter by surface mail to each of its 400,000 members. This month’s issue will be recommending the “Poems for… project.  So a large community of people will be put in touch with us. The newsletter refers to a longer piece on the project that…

The conference brought together academics, medical professionals and poets and others working at the arts/health interface. Guest poet was Marilyn Hacker. Here is the power-point presentation that I presented there. And here is the paper which I read.

You will find thirty different languages represented in the collection. These include : Mandarin, Japanese, Tamil, French, German, Italian, Russian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Estonian, Ewe, Igbo, Tigrinya, Somali, Afrikaans and /Xam. The last six named are languages spoken in Africa south of the Sahara, either presently or in the past. But this time there is also…

We have already reported on a day held in Rochester in July of this year, which brought together children from several schools in the region of Medway (see”Two Hundred school children celebrate diversity in Medway”). The purpose of the day was to celebrate diversity and to explore some of the richness of our different cultures,…

Photograph: Graham Turner 2008 was the 60th birthday of the NHS. As part of the celebrations, the NHS commissioned Michael Rosen, still then the official Children’s Poet Laureate, to write a poem. His “These are the Hands” is meant to be for children but is appreciated by all age-groups. With its subject a health service…

In the Autumn of 2007 I was put in touch with Amy Thompson who works in Medway as local government advisor on Minority Ethnic Achievement. On seeing the bilingual poems, Amy asked me to supply one full pack for every school in her area of Medway – a total of 114 packs, each one consisting…

We now know how many of you registered (over 500) , what you wanted to use the poems for (mostly for use in schools) and where you’re located (about 400 from all over the UK and about 100 from everywhere else in the world). The exercise included collating the email addresses – so that in…

Rogan Wolf, the project worker for “Poems For…”, put together the short report during Christmas 2008. It entailed tracking all the registrations the new site had received since the April launch, and establishing where they had come from and how they planned to use poem-posters once down-loaded. You can read the report here. Findings from…

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…