Poetry Day Ireland 2020 will be a virtual festival this year

Poetry Day Ireland will take place as a digital/virtual festival on Thursday, April 30, allowing everyone to take part from the safety of their own home and collectively experience the joy of poetry.

The director of Poetry Ireland, Maureen Kennelly, has announced that plans for this year’s festival had to be amended from the original format due to the ongoing fight against Covid-19.

Now in its sixth year, this annual celebration of the spoken and written word is presented by Poetry Ireland in partnership with poetry lovers the length and breadth of the country.

And while this year will see a different format than the norm for Poetry Day Ireland, it will be an uplifting and interactive opportunity for everyone to connect through virtual poetry workshops, video poetry readings, social media and much more.

Events lined up so far for this year’s festival include a Poetry Day Ireland virtual pub quiz, an online poetry workshop for beginners and video readings from the shortlisted poets for The Moth Poetry Prize in the run-up to the live announcement of the winner of the €10,000 prize.

Poetry Day Ireland will also present well known figures reading poems in a series of videos, as it has done in previous years, and share 12 beautiful time-themed Pocket Poems online and through social media.

The theme this year – ‘There will be time’ – has been in the works since last autumn, long before the current guidelines were put in place in Ireland. It was partly chosen as 2020 is a leap year, when we gain an extra day of time that didn’t exist in the previous year. Today, the theme of time resonates with us in another way due to the impact of the Covid-19 measures on our daily lives and our sense of time passing.

Each poem is, in a way, a time machine – travelling to the past or the present or the future, examining the way we were, are, and hope to be.

There is still time for people to register their virtual/online only event on the Poetry Day website; just visit www.poetryday.ie.

The Poetry Day Ireland team is keen to know how everyone will be marking this day at home. You can let them know by using #PoetryDayIRL.

Poetry Ireland gratefully acknowledges the support of its principal funders the Arts Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.