National Poetry Day is a UK wide celebration that occurs on the first Thursday of October each year.

The theme this year is ‘The Environment’ and we wanted to take this moment to highlight some Manchester organisations that have poetry as a focus. Due to the nature of the world, right now, there is an environmental setting to some of the poetry they create or champion.

We believe they’re worth your time.

 

Bent Key Publishing

“Bent Key exists to amplify marginalised voices who have found themselves ostracised from traditional publishing routes” gives a strong idea of Bent Key’s ethos and where they’re looking.

They publish ethically and share their profits with the artists, concentrating on giving them opportunities to tour and perform alongside publishing their words. They work with poets, as well as storytellers and non-fiction writers. Their only requirement for submission is the writer having a lot of passion for the story inside them and this can be seen throughout their work.

 

 Carcanet

Carcanet, now in its fifth decade, publishes a comprehensive and diverse list of modern and classic poetry in English and in translation, in addition to a range of inventive fiction, Lives and Letters and literary criticism.

Carcanet’s published poets range from Ovid to Gillian Clarke, Robert Graves to Eavan Boland and Mervyn Peake to Kei Miller.

 

Manchester Poetry Library

Manchester Metropolitan University opened the first public poetry library in the North West in 2021. In fact, their First Birthday Celebrations start next week!

The Poetry Library is located in a new MMU Arts and Humanities building on the Oxford Road. With a mission to widen access to poetry and to support the creation and performance of new writing from primary school to professional publication, they’ve curated a collection and events to do just that.

The core collection consists of late 19th – 21st century poetry in English from around the world. They stock journals, pamphlets, books, collections, anthologies, audio recordings, films, big press, little press, poetry for children, and poetry in translation. The library also runs events, reading groups, workshops, performances and more.

 

Young Identity

Young Identity work with young people between 13-2 5 years old, to deliver dynamic poetry and spoken word workshops.

Their voice cuts through the noise. They are unique and they stand out. They focus on the transformative power of the arts to young peoples’ lives, with a mission to “develop literacy, critical thinking and active citizenship for young people, through experimenting with the combined arts.”

Young Identity is a dynamic and innovative organisation nurturing the talent of tomorrow and empowering those at risk to fulfil their artistic potential.

 

Manchester’s Multilingual City Poets

We’ve highlighted this a lot, but that’s because we’re so excited about it. Manchester’s Multilingual City Poets have an event at this year’s Manchester Literature Festival. And it’s Free.

On Wednesday, 19th October at 7pm in the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, our City Poets will perform pieces of their work with a focus of the diverse languages represented in Manchester.

Jova Bagioli Reyes has written a new piece for the event which has been written in Spanish and translated to English, Anjum Malik has translated the poem to Urdu and Ali Al -Jamri has then translated it to arabic. All four versions will be performed as part of the evening along with more of their work.

This year, for World Poetry Day in March our Manchester Multilingual City Poets created the Poem ‘This Here’ a poem about Manchester written by Anjum Malik in Urdu and English, then translated by Jova and Ali. All the versions are on our YouTube channel.

(For World Poetry Day 2021, we worked with Manchester Poetry Library to commission work based on the theme of Doors as Portals and made an excellent video from the work that you can see here)