It is National Poetry Day here in NZ… I was lucky enough to be able to attend a live poetry reading in Nelson this evening. It was poetic indeed sitting outside the House of Ales, under the full moon with a glass of mulled wine to keep the cold at bay. We heard some neat poets, including Mark Raffills, Rae Varcoe, Cliff Fell and Rachel Bush…  the variety of themes worked well. It’s nice to know that poetry is still very much alive and recognised, although in a town with a population of 43,000 only about 40 attended the readings, a little sad as Nelson is often considered the Art capital of New Zealand.

Montana invited people to share their poems with the public on their website….. and I saw poems posted on blackboards at a couple of bars in town.

I wish we had more days like this, poetry is looked on by many as a thing of the past, but did people really have more time to stand and stare then? Thankfully for the poets and poetry lovers there are people out there trying to shout out about our art on the web…. I love Got Poetry

To end in a quote from yesterdays newspaper:
quote Jessica Le Bas:

Poems are small stories, tightly bundled.

They are puzzles, sometimes in foreign tongues. The pleasure of poetry can derive as much from the unpicking, the decoding, as from any notion of meaning. The sounds, that juxtaposition of rhythm and rhyme, are a far older joy than our need for logic.