The 70-Poet Challenge

Join me and join in. The 70-Poet challenge needs you. Can you find a new poet (new to you) and send us their name and the title of a poem? It doesn’t matter if the poet is published or unpublished. The only question is do you like their work? It can be a poet who writes nonsense poems or one who writes ballads suffused with anger and love, religion or anarchy. The poet could have written of nature and wrapped their poem in a folk song or harnessed it in the rhythms of a rap. Is the poet new to you and did you love their work? Then put them forward for the 70-Poet challenge!

It is strange that many people seem to think most poetry is written by writers long deceased. Subsequently poetry is the only literary genre plagued by the dead, making it a kind of zombie literary genre. Meanwhile all poetry and most poets are alive and well. Throughout the world poetry has never been more popular. It is a living breathing form. Zombie-less. So can you take up the 70-Poet challenge and present us with new ones (new to you) be they dead or alive and tell us their name and a poem they’ve written so that we can tell the world. Join the seventy poets to celebrate our 70th anniversary. New writers and new readers are the lifeblood of poetry. Without them poetry will die.

We love an anniversary in literature. It is the 48th anniversary of Commonword, a community publishing house in Manchester. It is the 40th anniversary of apples and snakes, it is the 55th anniversary of Arvon. It is the 30th anniversary of spread the word. It is 27th anniversary of the literary consultancy (TLC) , it is 31st anniversary of the verbal arts centre in derry. But the oldest of them is the national poetry library. It is our 70th anniversary in 2023 and we are celebrating the oxygen, the lifeblood of all libraries: new writers and new readers. Be part of the revolution and join the seventy poet challenge with me.