I read poetry to find out who I might become when in company with some of the most passionate, intelligent and eloquent people that have ever lived.  

I like it when a poem has encoded in the way it moves and sounds some sense of the writer’s delight at discovering their subject through the words they’re using. The poem remains a living record of an adventure into the unknown, and to read it is to re-live the excitement of that journey.

All too often, I think I know what the world is like, and tell the same old stories about myself.  But when I read a good poem, all those habits get tested: I wander through the limits of what I thought it was possible to think and be. That’s where my sense of euphoria, giddiness and disturbance come from. It is as if I were walking blindfold through imaginary brick walls. If you’ve ever closed your eyes and walked for as far as you dare across a beach and then opened them, you’ll get a sense of the astonishment that can come from reading poetry. As Emily Dickinson said, a good poem should take the top of your head off.

Of all the literary arts, I think poetry has greatest licence to move swiftly and unconventionally.  One of its jobs is to make language surprising in a way that few readers could tolerate if it went on for the length of a novel. This duty to be surprising (not necessarily outlandish), is often the cause of complaint that poetry is too difficult. Yes, some poets can be wilfully obscure, but a poem should make us look twice at words. It should make us marvel over the fact that it can carry so much meaning and feeling from one person to another; that words can be a sensual pleasure both in the ear and in the mouth.

And sometimes it’s necessary to concentrate hard in order to break your preconceptions of what writing should be like against an alternative point of view, even if, in the end, you reject it. In a world where we’re often categorised and pursued by marketing companies, or tested by psychometrics, poetry is one of the last and best refuges we have for a complete view of our puzzling selves. It stops us from settling too easily into the belief that other people are just like us, or just like we’re told they are, which has to be healthy both at a personal, national and international level.

Indeed, one of the utilitarian arguments for poetry is that it makes us attentive to the mechanism of linguistic communication. We may not all want to write poetry, but we can learn some of the poetic skills of persuasiveness, efficiency and accuracy and apply them in our working lives to smooth and fine-tune relations.

But, as a ‘poetry-for-poetry-sake’ reader, I’d simply say that it refreshes our sense of what language can do, and, as we’re creatures of language, it can refresh our sense of who we are and who we might become.  

I love it when a poem names an indefinable sensation I’ve had, but which I’ve never quite known I’ve had because no one has ever said, until that moment, ‘I’ve had it too’, in quite the right way.  I think that’s ultimately why I read and listen to poetry – it is to discover that someone else has been here, too.

John Clarke 

John Clarke is the winner of the 2007 Nottingham Open Poetry Prize, Director of the Beverley Literature Festival and acting poetry editor, Arc Publications

Scarborough Poetry Workshop will be presenting some of their work on National Poetry Day, 5 October, at a special lunch at the Stephen Joseph Theatre.

By rights poetry should have died out centuries ago. An artform that allowed oral societies to dramatise, memorise and relate their founding myths and legends, poems might seem out of place in modern society. But poetry has entered the human psyche so that every age and every place has need of poets and poetry. Scarborough is no exception.

The theme of National Poetry Day is identity. The English language has been so wonderfully grasped, wrestled with and moulded by the different peoples of these islands that it is impossible to imagine modern poetry without the special qualities brought by Irish poets like Louis MacNeice, Tom Paulin and Seamus Heaney, the Welsh Dylan Thomas and R S Thomas, and the Scots Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir. Recent immigration has brought a whole new life to British poetry through the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah, who picked up on the thrilling live performances of the punk poets of the 1970s.

Women now share centre stage in British poetry. It’s appropriate then that National Poetry Day featured poet is  Jackie Kay. A native of Edinburgh, with a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, Jackie was adopted by a white couple at birth and brought up in Glasgow. One of Britain’s most popular poets, her latest collection is Life Mask (2005).

Visit www.poetrysociety.org.uk for more information.