- Posted on November 11th, 2024
The Poetry Society – Empowering Young Voices Through Environmental Poetry and Global Engagement
For Arts Council England and Julie’s Bicycle’s annual report 2023-24, we feature over 50 practical examples of cultural organisations taking climate action including 9 other in depth case studies like this one. Check out the full interactive report here.
This case study was written by The Poetry Society, a membership organisation based in London, with the aim to promote the study, use and enjoyment of poetry. They share the results from their work engaging young people with environmental themes.
About The Poetry Society and Environmental Programming
The Poetry Society has been the UK’s leading voice for poetry since it was founded in 1909, working both nationally and internationally. We publish our influential magazine The Poetry Review, and run innovative education and commissioning programmes for people of all ages, working with a wide range of interdisciplinary partners to keep poetry at the heart of our public life.
The area where we feel we can make the biggest impact is through programming participatory projects that encourage engagement with environmental themes, especially for young people. Poetry can help forge that really close personal connection with the issues, taking something which can feel too big and too abstract, and making it immediate and real. When we feel we’ve heard a message so often we stop hearing it, young writers inevitably find new ways to surprise us into noticing.
“It can be difficult to explain feelings around biodiversity loss, mass extinctions, the devastation of nature and the indifference of world leaders,” says poet Daniel Clark (25). “The Poetry Society’s Young Poets Network plays a vital role in helping young people voice their fears, doubts, anger, pain… and hope. Poetry can’t reverse climate breakdown. But, as nature vanishes all around us, young poets are planting seeds for the type of world they want to grow up in.”
Young Poets Network Writing Challenges
In 2023-24 our online community for young writers, Young Poets Network, ran three environmentally themed writing challenges, in which 634 young people aged 7-25 wrote 1183 new poems on subjects including perceptions of animal cuteness and finding peace and improved mental health through nature. Our partners included the charity People Need Nature, the University of Birmingham, and Portland Japanese Garden.
Birmingham poet Aliyah Begum (21) explains how she hopes her work can inspire people to change their perspectives and look at nature with fresh eyes. “Poetry acts as a playground for me to try and imagine a better future. Whether I’m anthropomorphising birds or tadpoles, poetry allows me to explore what our world would say if it could talk back.” Poet Lara Mae Simpson (21), says, “I want my poetry to help people remember our deep, home-like connection to nature—how it can heal and hold us—and realise why we must protect the environment at all costs”.
From the hundreds of new poems young people write in response to the environmental prompts and provocations on Young Poets Network (YPN) every year, we publish a steady stream of the most inspiring poems to a large audience on our online channels and socials, as well as ensuring young poets reach adult readers in our print publications. In 2023 The Poetry Society’s YPN pages received 157,570 views, and social media followers grew beyond 300,000. We are always seeking wider opportunities for young voices to be heard and have influence, and our young poets have talked and performed poems about the climate emergency at COP and on national radio. In 2023-24 they performed live at events in New York, Cape Town, and Johannesburg to an audience of global thought leaders (e.g. from UNICEF, UNESCO and the Nobel Peace Centre) who declared them ‘inspirational’.
Young Poets Network is an international platform, which means the perspectives of young people in the UK are showcased alongside young poets from some of the global communities most immediately impacted by climate change. In 2023 we have been working with writers’ collectives in Borneo, for example, and forged links with eco-poets in the Philippines and India.
Skills Development
Poems generated through Young Poets Network also feed into The Poetry Society’s work in formal education. In 2023, we produced a series of new resources for the DfE-funded National Education Nature Park, a project led by the Natural History Museum and the Royal Horticultural Society. The resources, which are mapped against the curriculum, are designed for pupils in Key Stages 1-4 and encourage pupils to use poetry as a tool to explore biodiversity. Each resource features a recent poem about nature, written by a young poet from our youth programmes. By putting writing by young people at the forefront of projects, we aim to demonstrate to school-age audiences that the issues explored in the poems are relevant to their own lives and their voices are valued. The resources underwent a climate science review and received the Royal Meteorological Society quality mark, contributing to an evidence-based approach to teaching about climate and biodiversity.
A current focus is building education programmes for classrooms across the UK that promote biodiversity renewal. Through our partnership on the RENEW project led by Exeter University and National Trust, in 2023 we delivered poetry activities for north-west schools at RHS Bridgewater’s pathfinder event and helped to develop a biodiversity summit for publishers and children’s writers with BookTrust. Supported by local wildlife trusts, in 2024 we began preparing a programme of visits to south-west primary classrooms, delivering writing activities led by expert poets responding to the sounds of bogs.
The Poetry Society champions poetry for all ages, and it’s a characteristic of our approach that we like to bring adult commissions and young people’s writing together in the same events, sharing one stage, just as we share one planet. To round off each year, we commission an annual poem for the lighting-up ceremony of the Christmas Tree in London’s Trafalgar Square, where it’s seen by an estimated 3 million people. Our commission for 2023 was written by poet Isabel Galleymore and performed by local children who’d been writing their own poems, in a joyful collective celebration of trees: “T is for the tree / that draws us together.”
Header image: Creating poems with poets Jonah Corren and Poppy Jayne Jones, Poetry Society bog poetry workshop, Plymouth, 2024 – The Poetry Society – Credits: Laura Ludtke for The Poetry Society
