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Using the work theme – ten top tips
from Jonathan Davidson, Director of Birmingham Book Festival

These tips are aimed at library managers and staff, but might work just as well in other contexts.

• Challenge people to include poetry in their workplaces – for instance poems in staff rooms, on the back of till receipts, on leisure centre notice boards, etc. Offer a prize for the most imaginative use of a poem in a workplace
• Commission poems about work from poets: how about five poems, one for each day of the working week?
• Using giant words pasted onto bricks or floor tiles, ask library visitors to join in with you ‘building’ a big mosaic floor poem (which will be flippin’ hard work, and no mistake)
• Division of labour: several poets set to work, each on a single aspect of the poem. One poet would make metaphors, another similes, another rhyme endings, another a selection of metres and a final group will weld them all together and roll them off the conveyor belt!
• Set up real ‘poetry workshops’ to not only write a poem but to physically make it in some form, for instance a poem chiselled out of wood, moulded from clay or sewn onto a banner.
• Give poems to workers on the way to work, at railway stations, at the entrances to hospitals, factories and shopping centres, anywhere where labour gathers and needs its dignity reasserted
• Ask for poems to be included with payslips, wage packets (if they still exist) in the week of NPD
• Collaborate with others who are interested in the subject of ‘work’ to write poems – trade unions, low-pay units, professional organisations, research departments.
• Commission a poem to represent the working day, from midnight through 24 hours, focusing on all the hidden workers who are hard at it day and night
• Gather together existing poems about work and display or otherwise promulgate these in the library or other places

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