The green grass of home

Tomorrow morning, the UK will wake up to National Poetry Day: an annual celebration of the written and spoken word. Across the country, there’ll be edible poetry cakes (better than inedible ones, no doubt), limericks and readings a’plenty, and the South Bank Centre will host a daunting ‘thousand poem challenge’.

Each year, the day has a different theme and this time around, it’s the deceptively simple idea of ‘home’. Deceptive because we all instinctively know what ‘home’ is, but its a far more elusive concept than it first seems – home can mean almost anything; a long-abandoned birthplace, a landscape, a set of four walls. To many, home is more to do with people than place.

I often find I have a clearer sense of being away from home than ‘at home’. Returning to the town where I grew up this weekend, I encountered my dad in the kitchen, grimly muttering the words of Robert Frost: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’ Well, who can blame him…

Likewise, anywhere can be a home-from-home: just ask the barman of my local pub. Home is where the heart is, after all… Daljit Nagra, Dreadlockalien and others have all been blogging about personal notions of home and homesickness on the National Poetry Day website and you can read their thoughts here, including Ian McMillan’s ‘home as a haven’, Jo Shapcott’s ‘home, a baggy old coat’ and my meditation on mountains, Larkin and whisky.

Ironically, I’ll have little chance to put my feet up at home throughout October: you can catch me on the road at a series of forthcoming readings, notably Hull Truck Theatre (with Luke Wright) on October 20th and at The Low Wood Hotel with Felix Dennis on October 19th – did anyone mention the free wine? Next month; Peterborough, Cambridge and a pennine poetry extravaganza…

Meanwhile, tomorrow afternoon from 1-4, The Wordsworth Trust will be hosting poetry readings every hour, with readers including Mark Ward, Penny Boxall, Andrew Forster and myself. We’ll be exploring the theme of ‘home’ within spitting distance of Wordsworth’s own homely cottage… Do drop in if you’re in the area!