#NationalPoetryDay

William Sieghart, the British entrepreneur who founded National Poetry Day in 1994, did so because he believed that there were millions of talented poets who deserved recognition for their work. Social media is helping to make that happen. The day has become an annual event, celebrated globally on the first Thursday of October. Susannah Herbert (@ susannahherbert) of Forward Arts Foundation, the charity that coordinates National Poetry Day, said this year’s theme — Truth — was selected “because these days there’s a great hunger for truth — in both public and personal lives — and a great skepticism, too.” Speaking on a podcast from National Poetry Day and Michael O’Mara

Books to celebrate the event’s 25th anniversary, British Poet Laureate Simon Armitage said that when politicians use clichés it feels like “some kind of screen being erected in front of you.”

“One thing we tend to think about politicians is that they use language to get their own way,” he said. “The language of politics becomes very tired very quickly and it stops feeling like it has any truthfulness at all because it is just so shallow and threadbare.” @raymond Antrobus said in a tweet: “Happy #NationalPoetry Day – if poetry did not matter to our species, it would have died a long time ago.” @Onthisdayshe tweeted: “On #NationalPoetryDay, we celebrate Sappho (c.620–c.550 BC), one of the earliest personal voices of world literature. Hailed as a great lyric poet in her lifetime — Plato called her “the tenth Muse” — her work was lost for millennia and recreated from fragments.”