Poems for World Day - Be Inspired

Adrian Mitchell

Adrian Mitchell has been a free-falling poet, playwright and writer of stories since the mid sixties. He spends more and more of his time writing for children nowadays, partly because he has six grandchildren.

Adrian Mitchell has kindly given us permission to publish one of his favourite poems. He hopes that people, children especially, will be inspired to pick up a pen and write a poem after reading Twenty-one Secrets of Poetry.

Wendy Cope

Poet Wendy Cope was born in Erith, Kent in 1945 and read History at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She trained as a teacher at Westminster College of Education, Oxford, and taught in primary schools in London (1967-81 and 1984-6). Her poetry collections include Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986), Serious Concerns (1992) and If I Don't Know (2001), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1987 and was awarded the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse (American Academy of Arts and Letters) in 1995. Wendy Cope is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Winchester, England.

Wendy Cope offers some of her thoughts and suggestions about writing poems

Alice Oswald

Alice Oswald lives in Gloucestershire and is married with two children.

Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, was the recipient of the Forward prize in 1996.

Her second collection, Dart, was published by Faber in 2002 to great acclaim and won the 2002 T. S Eliot Prize for Poetry.

Oswald has also written a third collection, Woods etc, and edited an anthology of poems, The Thunder Mutters, both of which were published in Spring 2005.