Poetry and Childhood Conference & Exhibition
A Faculty of Education and British Library Conference
This 2 day international academic conference on Poetry and Childhood, to be held at the British Library on 20/21 April 2009, will accompany a British Library exhibition, Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat! 250 Years of Poetry for Children which opens on April 1st 2009. The main thrust of the exhibition will be poetry written specifically for children from the eighteenth century to the present day, concentrating on key poets and collections. Beautifully illustrated early editions will feature strongly, with highlights including Bunyan's Country Rimes for Children, Watts' Divine Songs, Blake's Songs of Innocence, Lear's Nonsense Songs and Stories, Rossetti's manuscript of Sing-Song and Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. They will be displayed alongside works by more recent poets. Another strong thread will be the oral tradition and nursery verse, including the Opies' sound archive. Poetic language and form in all its variety will be celebrated including the informal vernacular of playground rhymes and dialect poetry from the Scots of Rabbie Burns to Caribbean nation language. The voices of women poets will be reclaimed for the nursery and the links between poetry and song (including hymns) will be highlighted.
The conference and exhibition is organised jointly by University of Cambridge Faculty of Education and the British Library in association with the Children's Laureate (Michael Rosen) and Book Trust. The conference is likely to be of greatest interest to scholars of children's literature, but academics, teachers, poets, librarians, booksellers and others with an interest in poetry and childhood will also be welcomed. Conference speakers include the Poet Laureate (Andrew Motion) and Children's Laureate (Michael Rosen), as well as Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay, two of the finest poets writing for children (and adults) today. Professor Lissa Paul, Brock University, Canada will give the keynote address. In addition, members of British Library staff will offer workshops on different aspects of British Library collections of children's poetry. Scholars attending the conference will give academic papers on a wide variety of topics within the field of children's poetry. We hope there will also be a panel discussion on contemporary poetry for children, looking at publishing trends over the last decade from the point of view of an editor, a critic and a poet organised by Antonia Byatt from the Arts Council (to be confirmed).
The event is a first of its kind and is already attracting scholars and teachers from many parts of the world.
Morag Styles May 2008.