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Posted on 03/10/19 in Landscape and Nature, Walking, Writing
National Poetry Day in the Cairngorms
Hooray! It’s National Poetry Day today!
For my five years at Kingussie High School library, this was always one of the highlights of my year, when we had poetry readings at lunchtime with drinks and biscuits. There was always a heart-thrilling mix of poems, including in other languages and, last year, in song.
National Poetry Day is a wonderful, country-wide celebration of poems classic and contemporary; a chance to return to an old favourite and discover new gems; an encouragement to sharpen your pencil and have a go yourself.
If that sounds too difficult and you’re struggling for ideas, why not try a Cairngorms Lyric? They’re only 15 words long and even if you’ve never been to this beautiful part of Scotland, you can still write one. If you do, please share it with the hashtag #CairngormsLyric and let’s see how many we can have ringing round the internet!
Here’s one of mine, the first of a series of ten called Calling the Mountains which I will read at Ness Book Fest tomorrow (Friday 4th October) and will be published in our Shared Stories: A Year in the Cairngorms anthology coming out in November:
Ben MacDuie – Beinn MacDuibh
The Mountain of the Son of Duff
High King of Thunder
Old Grey Man
Chief of the Range
Head of the Clan
Another fun and non-threatening way of coming up with poetry is to do it with others. I don’t believe poems are meant to be solitary pursuits; they grow out of our lives together and are shared back into the world. They can also be created in community.
One of my workshops for the Shared Stories: A Year in the Cairngorms project was with the tremendous folks who volunteer across the Park as Health Walk leaders. In the morning we followed HighLife Highland ranger, Saranne Bish, around Anagach woods, where she told us so many fascinating things about the forest and sent us seeking out all its colours. Here’s a wee video of it made by Sian Jamieson from the Park team: Anagach Walk
In the afternoon, I led a workshop on how Health Walk groups might explore different creative responses through words, whether investigating place names, using Talk Cards or writing. One activity was to get everyone to complete the sentence ‘On today’s walk…’ on a post-it note. I gathered these in, arranged them in an appealing order and – voila – a Group Poem was born! Reading it out to everyone at the end of the workshop brought surprise and delight at how easy it was to create and how rewarding to hear.
On Today’s Walk
Group Poem created at Cairngorms National Park Health Walk Leaders’ Training Day
11th September 2019
On today’s walk
we met, we talked, we stopped, we observed
life on a dead tree
On today’s walk
we chatted with new people
we stopped a few times to look around
the sun shone
and the wind blew the cobwebs away!
On today’s walk
we looked at the spectrum of colours
the chatter flowed
the senses were stirred
On today’s walk
we collected a range of scraps
of colour in nature,
looked at lichen
through a magnifier
we sensed the soft decay of autumn
we found the mushrooms for tea
On today’s walk
there was no rain
the invisible snail left a clue
a visible, silvery trail
On today’s walk
we did talk, talk, talk
Why not try it with your own group, whether on a family holiday, with work colleagues (see here for how CEO Grant Moir did something very creative for the Park staff away-day) or in a club or hobby group? Whatever you do, please take a moment on National Poetry Day to stop for a moment and savour a poem – reading or writing. Use the comments below to tell me your all-time favourites!