Poetry Month is returning for the third year, with events spread across the national calendar during August. There will be showcases, workshops, writing prompts, poetic installations, live and online events, the National Poetry Month Gala in Sydney celebrating 20 years of Red Room Poetry (including the release of its anthology A Line in the Sand) and 30in30 (a new poem by a different poet presented for each day of the month).
Knowing the value of influencing impressionable young minds, Victorian Poetry Month Ambassador, Emilie Zoey Baker, would love full-scale infiltration of schools with various tools of poem-creation: ‘If I was to be crowned The Greatest Poet in All The Land! (I think that sounds better than Laureate), I would wallpaper poetry into the education system. I’d arrange residencies for poets in every Australian school, so that kids would go into their teenage years wielding pen-swords of expression, able to unpack the anxieties, emotions and obstacles of life.
