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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 of 145 individual A4 poem-posters. They were delivered in style by aged Carlsson Saab one stormy Autumn evening, with the Norman walls of Rochester Castle lowering at us from across the river. The excitement of that little adventure generated a further suggestion - that we could offer a bilingual reading to children from interested schools in Amy’s area. For the concept of these short bilingual poems converts well into live readings - a quick succession…

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 future we can notify you of new collections becoming available. As far as I am concerned, the UK registrations has been a major geography lesson ; I have been introduced to many UK towns and localities that I’ve never heard of before. Of the 101 registrations from non-UK locations, most of them came for the USA - a total of 32, a significant proportion of them from teachers working in the Deep South. The remainder…

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 the report emphasise the high proportion of UK schools interested in this project, followed by public libraries. The main reason for the interest in nearly all cases is the fact that large numbers of the poems are bilingual, "in celebration of diversity." But also the report reveals that this project is now of international interest, doubtless for the same reason - that the poems celebrate diversity. For example, during one week-end in the Autumn of…

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…