The Poetry Project aims to bring communities together through creative writing and performance. It encourages the community-wide participation of school-age children who write poems around an event of cultural significance and draw others into the experience. Poets come to schools, poems are published on posters and in chalk, and most importantly they are read aloud in classrooms, playgrounds and libraries.

The project is a collaboration between the Michael King Writers’ Centre, the Devonport Community Coordinator Maire Vieth, poet Michele Leggott and the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc). Building on the success of A Million Poems for Matariki on Auckland’s North Shore in 2009, The Poetry Project has broadened its scope in 2010 to encompass other Auckland communities. Events in Otahuhu and on the North Shore have generated not only a wealth of poems but resource materials for other communities wanting to undertake poetry initiatives of their own.

We invite you to view and read these pages, to make use of the resource kits and to let us know of other places where kids, poems and communites are getting together.

The Poetry Project was funded in 2010 by a grant from the North Shore City Council.

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