Throughout September we have been looking forward to National Poetry Day on Thursday 1st October here at GROW.

We’ve ran four poetry workshops across Rotherham and Barnsley where we have been looking at poetry and creating our own inspired by other poems, by things we find in the world and this year’s theme ‘Wonder’.

To celebrate National Poetry Day, we’re going to spend two days sharing work from our workshops, and then two days sharing some poems written by local women.

Poetry has such power as a creative outlet, as a way to connect to other people and to bring on strong emotions so we’re so proud and excited to share these brilliant poems with you.

As part of our workshops, we ordered poems which had been cut into lines, guessing at the formation or poems we hadn’t heard before. This exercise had women listening to rhythm and rhyme alongside meaning, priming them for creating their own poetry.

We also used paint tester colours and their super poetic names to inspire our poetry. We thought about mood and emotion alongside words in this exercise.

Found poetry borrows words and phrases from other sources, finding poetic beauty through recontextualisation. Here are some examples of found poetry which were created in poetry workshops in September.