| Who’s in this picture, and what’s been happening? They have been working with us at our Poetry in the Branches training in Elgin...
During an intensive day and a half in Elgin Library in September, we dived headfirst into training on increasing poetry in the life of library branches - swapping ideas, tackling poems and precepts head-on, pooling contacts, making wishlists and digesting large amounts of information.
And why were we all working so hard? Because poetry matters. Because just one person, like a skilled and enthusiastic librarian taking a few minutes to recommend a poetry book, can open a door for other readers; not only in what we read, but the books and the poems and the worlds we feel able to explore.
Poets and performers Elspeth Murray and Tim Turnbull put passionate cases for the ways they see poetry changing and touching people’s lives. Tim talked about writing and reading poetry with prisoners and about his own way into performance poetry; Elspeth about how her poems have taken on lives of their own, from recycling beach sandals in Kenya to speaking for the needs of cancer patients in the NHS.
‘A valuable course and good for the soul!’ said one of the participants. 'Poetry in the Branches' is a training model developed by Poets House in New York, and adapted with their help for librarians in Scotland. Thanks to the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, we’ll be running the course twice again next year – first up will be an Edinburgh course on 5&6 June 2008.
Elgin Library are generous hosts, and ready to share the recent Library building, set in Cooper Park with its flowers and duckpond, a few moments’ walk from the majestic walls of Elgin Cathedral. They give a home to a Scottish Poetry Library outlying collection, and now to one of the brand-new Poetry Boxes. Besides the SPL collection of books, there are additional shelves of some of Moray Libraries service’s own poetry books, a tantalising selection of classics and new collections and anthologies. The comfortable reading area placed invitingly close to the poetry books – not to mention Elgin Library’s cafe, with its outstanding scones and coffee – make poetry reading a real pleasure.
And it's not only for librarians. For adult readers, Elspeth and Richard Medrington provided a tour de force introduction to poetry for fiction readers in the shape of the Novel Approach list. And at Elgin Library's Family Learning Day, Elspeth ran workshops for children to make their own poetry booklets from scratch (also supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation project). Now that's catching your readers young.
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