BBC Blast and The Poetry Society have partnered up to bring you this year’s SLAMbassadors competition. Six winners will be invited to a two day masterclass event to be held in London with leading UK poets. The winners will also get the chance to show their skills at a live slam poetry event and perform alongside professional poets including Scroobius Pip and Benjamin Zephaniah!

Write an original piece (poem or rap) on the theme of identity and win the chance to perform at a live slam poetry event. Record your original track in less than 60 seconds and upload to our showcase now!

HOW TO ENTER

If you are 13-19 and want to enter the competition send us an audio or video recording of yourself performing your original verse as a rap, song or spoken word in 60 seconds or less.

For more information on Slam and a further workshop not on the Blast tour, find out more on The Poetry Society’s SLAMbassadors UK website.

YOU CAN ENTER BY:

1. Uploading your entry to BBC Blast website and tagging it ’slam09′.
2. Email your entry to blast@bbc.co.uk with your name, age and email address and put ‘SLAMbassadors Competition’ in the subject line.
3. Send by post with details of name, age and email address to: ‘SLAMbassadors Competition’, BBC Blast Online, MC3 D2, 201 Wood Lane, London W12 7TS.

Deadline: 5 October 2009

Are you passionate about writing? Can you write in a variety of styles? And about issues of our time?

My Voice is looking to help nine 13 to 19 year old writers develop their skills. Bursary winners will be mentored by professional writers, have a chance to share their own writing to a large audience, receive book tokens and work with local libraries to help select great books for young people.  

For more information visit: www.myvoicewriteorwrong.org

Thursday 8 October 2009

This year on National Poetry Day readers and writers young and old will celebrate the sixteenth National Poetry Day with the theme Heroes and Heroines. To mark the day the BBC will reveal the country’s poetry hero, the result of their nationwide poll to find the Nation’s Favourite Poet.

From Land’s End to John O’Groats the public will show off their poetic flair and be creative for a day, celebrating heroes and heroines in verse, with events inspired by figures as diverse as Nelson Mandela, JK Rowling, Margaret Thatcher, David Beckham and even the local lollipop lady.

 Events to mark National Poetry Day will take place in libraries, bookshops, theatres, clubs and schools across the UK and Republic of Ireland. Events will be posted online at the website link below. Visit the website to find out what’s happening in your area or to add your own event.

www.nationalpoetryday.co.uk

Likestarlings.com is an ambitious new website that gets poets talking in poems. Poets who don’t know each other – and who may be very different – are paired. They begin with a poem by one of them and then write poems back and forth, each responding to the last, until there are two new poems by each poet, and a conversation of five. Poems are published on the site as they are written.

The aims of the project are to discover something in writing in response, to produce good poems, and introduce poets, both well-established and new, to one another. It also offers a new way into reading poems. An associated blog, which includes guest essays, provides a forum for discussing the process and meeting new poets.

The organisers would love to hear from those who are interested in taking part. Submission instructions are on the website at www.likestarlings.com