01 March 2010 - Carrying Poems around Edinburgh

Nestled in neatly behind Canongate Street in Edinburgh is the Scottish Poetry Library, central hub to the "Carry a Poem" movement that has been sweeping through the world's first ever UNESCO City of Literature.

Walking round the city, you could find poetry from all walks of life and schools of literary thinking: Robert Burns, G.K. Chesterton, Douglas Dunn and Edward Lear were just some of the names I spotted. And in all kinds of places, shapes and forms, too: on business cards, blown up in the windows of office blocks, projected onto the Castle Rock come nightfall, even tied to trees and bushes in St. Andrew's Square.

There was also plenty of opportunity for audience participation: a few such shrubs had blank cards for your own poetic input - one already filled out in schoolboy handwriting with the chorus to Edwin Starr's 'War', with all the 'HUH's provided for good measure. For a genre that too often suffers from the need to be high-brow, it was great to see an initiative wanting to be edifying, inclusive and fun all at the same time.

And if you found a line you liked, you could take it along to the Poetry Library and the staff would point you in the direction of the whole poem or collection it was taken from. Brilliant. More brilliant was their stack of free poetry-based postcards, including a photo of that most illustrious piece of graffiti, "Hip Hop / Chip Shop". Now that's what I call poetry.