National Poetry Day

I mean, not for a moment.

It's National Poetry Day.

It's National Black Dog Day.

National Model T Day.

Hello and welcome to season five of Authors Matters, the podcast from ALCS.

I'm your host, Caroline Sanderson, and our focus for this episode is National Poetry Day 2026, which we'll be celebrating on Thursday, the 1st of October.

Each year, National

Poetry Day is the biggest mass celebration of poetry in the UK, with broadcasts and live events and events in schools and much, much more.

And as a sponsor of National Poetry Day, ALCS is keen to highlight the wider importance of the event and encouraging people of all ages to engage with poetry and champion the value of writers.

work.

And this year's theme for National Poetry Day is wonder.

And while we're wondering about that, let me introduce our guests.

conversations were just, you know, loads of tangents.

And we would just talk for, you know, ages and ages, wouldn't we? About a certain theme that was getting us all excited.

We couldn't pin it down onto paper, I don't think.

So we decided it should stay through the airwaves.

which brings us on to the kind of the format of it because so one idea we had was that we would take a poetry book or a theme and then we would just discuss we'd do an episode where we would chat about that theme using poems that we have both found or read before or we've you know writing that we've researched or quotes whatever it is literature that helps us to find a way into that theme or a way to explore it and discuss it which we would still like to do particularly because we talk poetry a lot between us and we send each other poems a lot so we thought that would be a great idea for some of our episodes.

So basically we're going to do that today, aren't we? We're going to introduce

ourselves

and I'm going to say no more because I

World Vegetarian Day.

National Poetry Day, celebrated in the United Kingdom.

And last on the list, we have actually two, three more.

Excuse me.

The blossoms break the mirror of the lake and adroitly aim their tongues of flame."

We'll take that for National Poetry Day.

What was the book called again?

It's called Unearthed, and it's by Nicholas Bateman.

How Do You Say That?

So it was National Poetry Day yesterday in the UK.

Of course it was, yes.

Yes.

...

Model T Day, National Black Dog Day, National Poetry Day.

Black Dog Day?

Yeah, uh, 'cause of the Led Zeppelin song, I think.