Poetry Parnassus, Winning Words, Shake The Dust and The World of Shakespeare festivals could make 2012 the biggest year for poetry since 1965 when The Royal Albert Hall sold out for a poetry reading by the likes of Ted Hughes and Allan Ginsberg. (Pic)

In Winning Words poetry is celebrated in public spaces beginning at The Olympic Park. In Poetry Parnassus a poet from each Olympic Country descends upon Southbank Centre. In Shake The Dust performance poetry is taken to a fine art and in The World Shakespeare Festival the most popularly performed poet of all is celebrated throughout Britain and The Globe. The contemporary, the historic, the abstract and  the naturalistic are for once together celebrating the form that unites them.

Unless it gives rise to unpredictable events of poetic brilliance in popular culture it will bore the heck out of me. In England for poetry 1965 wasn’t actually as great as 1967 when three men, not from the metropolitan soup with its weakened overused stock, but from Liverpool changed poetry forever. A clever editor from Penguin in London published them in Mersey Sound still in print today. Englands present poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy was part of that time as she is of this. The ingredients of the poetry potion concocted in  2012 could produce a spell that will work wonders for the future of literary Britian otherwise it’s what Luke Wright once perceptively or cynically called “A sales conference”.