S5 Ep2: National Poetry Day

To celebrate National Poetry on 1 October 2026, journalist Caroline Sanderson sits down with Chris Redmond and Francesca Beard from the Hot Poets Collective to talk about how they're bringing poetry and science together to address the climate emergency.  

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Hello and welcome to season 5 of Authors Matters, the podcast from ALCS. I'm your host, Caroline Sanderson, and our focus for this episode is National Poetry Day 2026, which we'll be celebrating on Thursday, the 1st of October. Each year, National Poetry Day is the biggest mass celebration of poetry in the UK, with broadcasts and live events and events in schools and much, much more. And as a sponsor of National Poetry Day, ALCS is keen to highlight the wider importance of the event in encouraging people of all ages to engage with poetry and champion the value of writers' work. And this year's theme for National Poetry Day is wonder. And while we're wondering about that, let me introduce our guests. We're delighted to welcome to Authors Matters Francesca Beard and Chris Redmond of Hot Poets Collective. Hot Poets Collective bringing poetry and science together to make the planet cool again. And earlier this year it was announced that National Poetry Day would be teaming up with Hot Poets Collective to bring poetry and climate science and creativity into schools across the UK. So welcome to both of you. Thank you. Come to Authors Matters. So, Francesca, would you just start us off? Just introduce yourself as a poet, as a creator. Tell us a little bit about your work and how you became involved in Hot Poets Collective. And how does their mission, which I've outlined, and how does that chime with your own creative output?

SPEAKER_00 1:42

Yeah, so um I'm I'm a poet. I come from a spoken word background. So I usually perform my poetry live. So I met Chris years and years ago. Uh Chris does this incredible live night with a jazz band, and he invites poets to improvise their own original work to the jazz band with a really fantastic twist that you have to go to the event and see in action. It's it's a really wonderful night. So I've known Chris since since Tung Fu, since uh Tung Fu, um, which has various residencies and also tours. And um I my work is so as a spoken word poet, I perform my own work, I do my own shows, but I've also been, like many, many spoken word poets, very uh networked and kind of focused in into facilitation and creative workshops around I guess uh social change, arts activism. So we do a lot of work in schools, in prisons, in care centres, in uh in libraries, with very small to very old participants, with refugees all across the board. Trying to um bring poetry and voice to uh and you know, kind of amplifying the stories that maybe aren't so visible in mainstream culture. Uh so I a lot of my work is in facilitation. And one other thing that I'm really interested in is research, research-based work and kind of long-form work. So when Chris and Liv Talk set up Hot Poets and they asked me to be part of the collective, I was so delighted for many reasons. Firstly, because I think like a lot of people, let alone, you know, well, artists, but everybody I think has been concerned about the climate emergency and thinking about what we can do personally and politically to try and make a difference and to feel hopeful. So for that very personal reason, but also because Hot Poets has this ethos of uh uh change for social good, of arts activism, of trying to amplify voices that are less, you know, less kind of mainstream, less centered, more invisible. Yeah, and and also I think that the poets that they work with are the poets that I really admire on the scene. So it's it's the whole deal, really. You get to work with incredible artists doing really important, timely work, which is very personal and political.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

I was so impressed researching it, reading about the sort of sheer diversity and uh of the initiative. Um, Chris, so your co-artistic director of Hot Poets Collective. So tell us a little bit, um, like Fantasca, who's actually introduced you rather beautifully as well as herself, which is perfect. So tell us a little bit about your evolution as a poet and performer and how Hot Poets Collective came into being.

SPEAKER_02 5:02

Um, yeah, I mean, you've done a lovely job of introducing it. I'm a poet and a musician and a performer. Um, and so I started performing in bands. Um, and that was my teens and twenties, and poetry was my quiet little thing that I did for myself. And then in London I met more and more people who were performing live and then open mics, and then it sort of morphed. At some point, I switched from identifying as a musician to being at least half and half as a poet, and then probably got more and more into writing, and the music has always been part of it with Tung Fu, like you said. Um, so it's very much in a performance sort of space. That's how I have discovered writing um and how I feel most at home. And similar to Francesca, a lot of the other work, aside from being on stage, is about facilitating and teaching. So those are the sort of two spaces, and I think one really feeds and helps the other as well. Um, and uh, in terms of how Hot Poets started, so uh I've worked with Liv for years. Um, we had a little Ramshack or cabaret called the Hip Yak Poetry Shack, uh, which was touring around the Southwest, and that became the poetry stage at WOMAD, which now Live programs, and so we've got a long history of working together. And we were at Glastonbury Festival in um 2019. Uh, it was the year that the climate emergency had been called by the government, so everyone was feeling it very strongly. There was a a kind of it had been named properly for the first time. When the Prime Minister calls it something, everyone leans forward, right? So there was a lot of grief. Um, I think that people were openly acknowledging, maybe for the first time around climate. We were at Glastonbury and we were watching a very well-known artist um do uh this set um to thousands of people, and they had a piece about climate and where we were going, and they used the phrase, we're doomed, and every part of me knows it. And it was a big thing, and several thousand people just sort of sank a few inches deeper into the mud. And Liv and I kind of looked at each other and went, Is you know, is that it? Is that is that what we've got? Can is there another story here that we can mine, you know? Because on the one hand, a a lot of people writing in reaction to whatever is going on in the world, understandably and necessarily. And that's a part of being an artist, is sort of being a mirror and holding up and being a kind of almost like a uh you know, a lightning rod. Um you're sort of absorbing the mood of the time and and framing it and shaping it back. But a lot of the stuff around climate felt um reactionary and fearful and not necessarily particularly well informed. Um and around that time, Liv had had a poet, a poem that had sort of gone viral. She wrote a poem called The Human Emergency, and it was about her kind of concerns around the environment as a mother of two young children, and that poem had gone viral, and it sort of um was used in protests in in uh Australia, and it was put to an orchestral piece of music in Philadelphia and it inspired the mothers rise up movement. And so she's having this moment of wow, a poem can do a lot. It's not you know, it's inspiring other people to do things. And around the same time, after a Tung Fu show, I um by chance met a woman called Mikhail Nachmani, who is now on our board of directors, who at the time was uh working at the Grantham Institute at the LSE. Um and she was in charge of the world's database of the most polluting companies, the 500 companies that have got us into this mess. So I was immediately impressed because she was in charge of the world's something. And I was like, cool, what do you do with that? And um and she said, Well, we use it as leverage to try and encourage shareholders to pressure the companies that they invest in to divest, to change their behavior. Uh, divest from fossil fuels, um, and invest in you know, more renewables. And I said, Cool, how's that going? Expecting her to say it's really difficult, nobody's doing it. And she said, Well, it's going better than I could have possibly imagined. And I went, huh? I don't know that story. Tell me that, tell me more of that story. I feel different. I feel different in my body when I hear that story. I know the sad polar bear on the iceberg, I know the temperatures are rising, the seas are rising, I know those stories, and they they they give me a specific feeling. I want to know more about that one because it's not one I'm familiar with. Why don't I know that? And she's like, it's happening. You know, there is a movement. This has been happening for decades. Companies are changing, like everyone's got got to get there. And some are moving faster than others, and we need to go faster than we are. But so that sort of, you know, this kind of fed into this conversation that Liv and I had. And the more we started knocking on doors and speaking to people looking for these stories, the more we realized there were other stories out there around climate and the environment, as well as the sad polar bear on the iceberg. That is an important story, and we have to hold that. Um, but there are also stories of incredible people, really smart people, who've dedicated their lives and their entire careers in their fields to making the world better. And that feels like something I Liv and I, I guess, are both sort of, you know, uh optimists. I guess that's how we both orientate ourselves. So um it was it it was that this that was the challenge. It's like, let's find some more of these people, let's get a bunch of poets together and commission them to work with these scientists or architects or farmers or whatever. And uh and we made 12 poems. We took them to COP26 when it was in Glasgow. We went with a MetOffice, they were one of our partners. And then while we were there, we met some people from the UNFCCC. They invited us to further international conferences, and very quickly, within a space of the first year of setting it up, this was coming out of COVID, um, we just found ourselves in rooms with people that we would never have met. And lots of poems being written, lots of poems finding places in situations where you might not ordinarily think a poem would live. And those poems could do things, surprising things. Whether that was just uh shifting a mood in a room, whether that was raising funds for, you know, uh a reforestation project in Kenya, whether that was playing a part in sort of a narrative shift to help something happen. So there's quite a lot of things happen in that first two years, and we kind of kept going, wow, this is a different space for poetry. Um, let's keep doing it. So, you know, we've been sort of pushing and pushing, and we work with farmers, we work with engineers, we work with green architects, we've worked in five continents with kind of you know, hundred plus scientists and poets, and and uh and it keeps uh growing and inspiring, and it feels like actually there's a role for artists here, not just to be the lightning rods and the reflectors, to but to be voices that amplify, like Francesca was saying, that can amplify some of those stories that might not all otherwise get heard. Because the sad polar about sad polar bear on the iceberg is um is a really compelling one. And um if we can tell some others, then we invite the possibility that we've still got quite a lot to play for. And I'd much rather work for that cause than just beating ourselves with the you know, with the stick of we're doomed, because I I can't live with that. That was a long answer.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

It was a long answer, but absolutely enthralling and and really buoying as well. And

Introductions

SPEAKER_01 13:00

I think so much to unpack there. I mean, you you were um constantly saying stories and narratives, and we realize that these are the things that people respond to in whatever context. So I think I think some people might be kind of quite surprised by the idea that kind of climate science and where we are on on um on all that could go together with with poetry. I mean, I um I mainly champion nonfiction. So I interviewed an amazing data scientist called Hannah Ritchie, whose book is essentially about all the things that are happening. Um, and she always says, you know, two things can be true at the same time. Everything's awful. So you've got to feel that visceral thing to impel you to do this work. But at the same time, there's more than one story to be told, as you said. And I think that's to me what was so fascinating reading um about your work before doing this was that sense that, you know, the arts and creativity are an integral part of everything. They're not just the icing on the cake, and the cake is the serious stuff that's actually going on in the issues, but um, it is an integral part of how we find our way through these huge issues that we face. Would that be is that my instinct right about that from your point of view, Francesca? Because you said you've done a lot of research. So they're not uneasy bedfillows these things, are they?

SPEAKER_00 14:17

I mean, well, for a start, poetry is in the non-fiction section. Yes, yes. So it's um so so poetry is uh uh it's it it's it's really about a kind of sense of authenticity when you're kind of performing spoken word. Uh what it's also I think about is about trying to get beyond words to get to some felt truth about the human experience. So for me, poetry is is actually about the space between the words rather than the words. It's uh it's about and maybe we'll touch on this later when we get to um those two letters AI. Yes, those two letters AI. Poetry is, I think, about trying to understand this phenomenal world through which we understand through our senses. We are embodied and we understand the world and we make reality such as it is through our our you know, our our kind of our feeling, our pro balance, our proprioception, our the temperature, the you know, the the emotions that we feel with with change, our smell, uh, our hearing, our touch, our sight. Um and it it's it's it's so that's where poetry has its roots, I think, and where it comes from. And when you can take poetry and then approach hard science and important science, you can then take something which is factual and which is important and which is quite detailed and granular and make it and and make it real to humans because famously humans find it very, very difficult to care about statistics and facts and data that humans always relate to story. Poetry isn't actually about it, it does tell a story, but it tells a story about being human and why and what our relationship is to the world, I think. And so when we're talking to scientists and we're listening to all of those facts, we're really interpreting it through how do we translate this through words so that people can inhabit the spaces between the words and understand what this science actually means, you know, what it and the significance of it and the the weight and the value of it, the reality of it, I guess. I don't know if that makes any sense.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

But it makes complete sense. And I I think it's so inspiring to have this conversation, particularly in the context of ALCS, who do a lot of lobbying with government about um the creative industries and the importance of supporting them on various fronts, you know, whether it be copyright or uh a generative AI, which we'll come on to talk about in a minute. Um let's get a little bit more specific and think about the theme of this year's National Poetry Day being wonder. So um we've mentioned various big words like doom, and so we know there are doomy things that we have to confront, but but the word wonder, I mean, I'm thinking that a lot of the work that you do is with young people. Um, no surprise, as they're the future custodians of our planet. Um, but I guess this is uh the wonder that that children have, you know, as a kind of natural instinct very often. How how do you see that theme working into what you do, Chris?

SPEAKER_02 17:50

So um so we've we've made an anthology called Wonder Thunder Blunder, um, which is uh a collection of 40 original poems by poets who have worked with these partners that we talked about, um all exploring different subjects. So whether that is uh you know, regeneration or farming or tech or uh pollution or whatever. And uh the wonder is the is that we are what we understand wonder to be. The thunder is the action, what are we doing? And the blunder is obviously meh, you know, how how how we got here. So um I think it's about the the the education project is is a new thing actually for us. So this is the first year that we've been running this project um in schools um with National Poetry Day, and I I think you know the the word wonder is about uh how are we how are we framing this conversation? Um if we frame it with these are some things to be scared about, where do you go from there? You can't just drop existential threat into a classroom and then say, let's make a poster now do maths. You know? So if we start with what do we love? What do you love? Where do you go that makes you feel good? And why do you think you feel that way? And is it a tree? Is it a park? Is it a memory of being on a beach with your family? Is it, you know, what where are those places in the natural world? And then obviously you can unpack well, did you know that scientists have proved that if we spend just 20 minutes in nature, you know, our brain kind of releases less stress hormones and it kind of helps us regulate because that's how we are as humans. That's how we've always been as humans. So you can start to introduce the kind of science from it. So the the principle of the wonder is starting with a with a sense of wow, what a world.

SPEAKER_00 19:47

I mean, it's so Socrates, I think, said wonder is the beginning of wisdom. And I think it's such an intellectual, it's it's a very human thing to have curiosity about the world. I mean, the world is fantastic, it's beautiful. Our world is the the diversity of it, the kind of the different animals, the flora, the fauna, just the you know, the way that gravity works. It's it's incredible. And I think to bring that into schools is is is not just so hopeful and enhancing for the this very real existential threat of the climate emergency and a way to help young people through that. But it's also so it just brings a kind of intellectualism back into the classroom that we start with wonder.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

Yeah, and and I was just thinking about how that sense of w wonder has driven so much poetry from time immemorial, actually, as well, isn't it? From kind of the cliche things you might think about now, like Wordsworth and the Daffodils or whatever it might be, it's a constant thread, I guess, through much, much poetry. So there's a lot to draw on, isn't there? Not not and not least your own work as well.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

I mean, poetry is, I think, has always been this incredible tool for asking questions, you know, not providing the answers, but answers, but asking the questions, what is this? How does it work? What is this feeling? What is this phenomenon?

SPEAKER_02 21:15

And and I think that in terms of what we're trying to do with our work with teachers, uh, with the resources that we've made and with the poets going into schools, um, we've kind of set it up so there's quite a few different ways that schools might interact with this. But um one of the things that we're interested in is bringing poetry into this allows that possibility immediately that we don't need to know all the answers. We can ask quite a lot of questions, and we can hold, as you said, Caroline, you can hold more than one truth at the same time. You can hold nuance, complexity, contradiction.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

I think that's one of the most important things you can say these days is that two things can be true at the same time. Exactly. Nuance, if you say.

SPEAKER_02 21:57

Exactly. And and how to live without.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Uncertainty, I think, is so important for human beings and possibly has always been really important, but certainly now it really is. I think young people are very challenged, you know, kind of psychically by all of the uncertainty in the world. And it poetry, for some reason, does give this vessel for uncertainty and allows us to just to contain those, those, those huge feelings. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:28

I love the thought as well of doing that with quite young children because I feel as if my children are in their twenties now and but the anxiety is there. It's really, it's it's real. So feeling that you are equipped to, you know, maybe deal with that from the kind of bedrock that you're of sort of ideas and thinking and wonder that you're talking about is really important. Um, talking about uncertainty, um, when we look to the future, we do have to consider the impact of generative AI, which you've already mentioned, Francesca. Uh, its impact on all of us and everything, but also on the creative industries. And that, of course, includes poetry, doing poetry for a living. Uh, it's not easy to make a living from it as it is. Have either of you been impacted personally, would you say, or have a view on how we might best respond? And maybe just tell us a bit about how concerned you are about uh the fact that generative AI is now a reality for so many people?

SPEAKER_00 23:30

For me, it it's really, I think there's what one I'm gonna try and be really brief because I know that Chris has got loads of things to say. Um so just as a human being and an artist, um, part of me is intellectually excited. I think the possibilities are, you know, not with all kinds of AI, but certainly with I have a background in research. I love research, I love engaging with new things. I think as artists, we we are very adaptable, we um come to change, you know, with a kind of openness. So that's me personally. However, I think what's happening with AI, I I think of it almost like what's happening with land. So uh let me just explain. So there are places in the world where some communities think that land um is there to be looked after and cared for and shared, and it belongs to everyone, including the future generations, and doesn't belong to anyone. Um, like for example, a river will be protected and cared for and would and is a kind of a living thing, right? Um, and then there are other um kinds of political, social kind of ideas where land or a river could be exploited. You could just use it to to generate wealth or to do whatever you wanted to do with it. And you wouldn't really have to think about future generations, or what if if it had its own rights, absolutely not. How could it? Or anyone else really having any rights towards that river. And I think the internet is really interesting. Obviously, it's not a river, it's not land, but it is a place where some parts of it have been built by many, many people who have given their resources and who wanted those resources to be shared, who have contributed to the sum of human kind of understanding and intelligence, and given their work in a generative, collaborative, community spirit. And now what's happening is that there's a certain entities or companies that are just exploiting that like a river, just saying, all right, I'm just gonna use this and I'm gonna extract what I need for money. Including authors as well. Absolutely. So I think that that in itself is absolutely abhorrent. And as we've seen in the industrial revolution, where there's been no checks and balances, and people have and you know, companies have just been allowed to exploit shared resources for money, and it's been absolutely disastrous, and it's led to this climate emergency. The same thing is happening in the digital sphere. That there have been there's certain, you know, companies that are just exploiting what should be protected and tendered for humanity and are just stripmining it for money. And that on that basis, I think we've had a terrible result from the industrial revolution. Let's let's absolutely put in place legislation and barriers and boundaries so that this doesn't happen with the internet who had which did, you know, there's been so many people who just donated their ideas and their knowledge. And and and that's that's for everyone, if it is for anyone.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

Chris, it it is such a huge subject. I'm just thinking, in the light of what Francesca's just been saying about for me, part of it is those young people, perhaps if we go back to them and them understanding that their creativity is theirs, and it's a it's a powerful, exciting thing that they have to to draw on, I suppose. Does that does that chime with you? That's what I was just in the light of the the work you've been talking about for Hot Poets Collector.

SPEAKER_02 27:34

I'm I'm similarly fascinated by it, and there's all sorts of ethical and environmental concerns, you know, with AI, the amount of resources it uses, obviously, you know, that is growing at such an alarming rate and sucking up huge amounts of power and water. Um, and also it's extraordinary what it can do, and the conversations you could have, the speed of research, the speed of a so, like, you know, in terms of the making the admin of being an artist quicker and easier, that's cool. I wish it didn't use that much water. Um, and also that's interesting, something that might have taken me a day or two, and spent quite a lot of time researching, pulling stuff together. If it's something that I I actually want to spend that two days, but I need to do it, I can still achieve that same work in half an hour. Um that's kind of fascinating. Um but in terms of like the creative process, uh for me, whether it's writing a poem or painting a picture or playing an instrument or whatever, it starts with an internal sort of feeling. It starts with a reflective feeling and uh a question or a sense of I I want to explore this. So for me, the idea that you would um use generative AI to do that heavy lifting for you is completely sort of counter the whole point of doing it, right? I mean there was an interesting thing that I read last week about Tidal, the music platform, where they they um they've said that they're going to label every AI created piece of music as AI. So it can't be confused for for human created, and then they're going to not uh allow that music to generate royalties. So because that music's a huge thing as well, right? So you know you can just punch in a bunch of keywords and create a track. Boom! Sounds amazing. It sounds like that band because you asked it to sound like that band. Um, so that was an interesting intervention that I saw um a platform making that choice and taking that responsibility. So we we can't stop this stuff being made. It will be made. There's questions about it its sort of value, um, what it's used for. For music, it's like a it seems like the natural extension of spot of Spotify of playlisting, like where artists are you don't even you can put a playlist on and not know any of those artists, but it just becomes sort of background mood filler.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

I don't know what the equivalent is of I don't know why you would read a book that was I think that that's I think you've touched on something that's really important because I think that actually one of the dangers is for to be in to to write poetry you need firstly to read poetry but also to have other people read poetry. So if you write a novel, you need the novel is as good as its readers, I would say, and as living as its readers. And I think, you know, I I'm old, I've come to a point, a place where I guess I'm not so scared by AI because I know, you know, I know that the process is really important. I know there's, you know, I don't want the metric that I measure success by. Like Chris was touching on, is the process that's happened and and how it feels in my bones and how it how it's changes me. If I write something, it changes me. Um if you haven't had that experience, if you come up as a new generation of consumers, sadly, and you haven't done the thing and you haven't spent the time reading and wrestling with difficult poetry or like a literary novel where you don't know what it means and you have to kind of like suspend your certainty or kind of develop your critical faculties. I I feel that it's gonna then be, and you just have this, you know, this deliverance of palatable, consumable, whatever it is that it'll generate. I I worry about that. I mean, I really worry that it's gonna change human nature, actually. And and yet, I want to say one other thing, which I think we talked about before, which is that we're what AI could never do, even though it can mimic it really successfully, is it doesn't have a body and it doesn't sense the world. So it doesn't experience, not I'm not even talking about emotions. I'm talking, you know, like the hormonal changes that a human being has. We have an autonomic and a, you know, a kind of uh nervous system. We have rest and digest and fight and flight. We feel so much emotion when we see a certain colour or we hear a sound, it vibrates through our bodies, our bones. And and AI can can write literature which seems to suggest that it has those feelings, but it never can because it's not embodied. And I think that's so important that actually, while we have bodies, and while we have senses and emotions and hormones, we're always going to want to get between the words into the spaces. And that's what really amazing literature and poetry does. It's not about the words, it's about the reader going into the spaces between the words.

SPEAKER_01 33:19

I think you've beautifully summed up why creators are, you know, at the front line of articulating that, of centering that, of advocating the importance of all the things that you've just talked about, because we're the people with the practice at articulating that, and we know how to get between the spaces between the words in our in our various different ways. Um completely fascinating. Well, okay, so uh in the spirit of National Poetry Day and its theme of wonder, it's been really wonderful to have you both on the podcast. So maybe our parting words would be something about um what do you hope that uh people will maybe do this National Poetry Day? What do you hope that they will take away from this wonderful initiative?

SPEAKER_02 34:12

I mean, from my perspective, I am thrilled that we're partnering with National Poetry Day because it means like thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of children will access these poems, and that's an opportunity for them to maybe see something from a fresh perspective, and also an invitation to write something from a fresh perspective. Um, so all of the all of the resources are built around this sort of Wonder Thunder Blunder collection. So we've got all sorts of things in there, and then exercises for them to to to kind of explore their own um experience or understanding or ideas around that one of those themes. Um and also there'll be loads of brilliant activities that are not related to these resources that are just taking the theme of wonder, and what a wonderful thing that is to have everyone for that day or around that day just thinking about there's a lot to be concerned about in the world right now. There's a lot of stuff that we're all just facing every day, and it's okay for us to kind of, and it's necess more than okay, it's necessary for us to kind of go, what do we know? What makes us ghast? What makes us feel alive and notice those spaces that you're talking about, right?

SPEAKER_00 35:34

What um it's such a gift to be able to have the theme of wonder when we come to nature and the world, isn't it? It's such a gift that we get to think about wonder when we talk about our planet. This the you know, it's because it's the it's Hot Poets, which is very much about the science and about how we can be hopeful about this climate emergency and then it's poetry and it's wonder all together. It's it's so beautiful because it's so hopeful. There's all these positives. I think that's what we really need. It's such a gift, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:12

And I and I hope, sorry, it's just a gym. I hope that some of those schools who engage with these poems and these resources and these ideas then recognize that there's an opportunity. A lot of teachers want to, they know that this stuff needs to be taught, and they're fearful too. And so what we're trying to do is go, there are other ways, and how we frame stuff determines how we orient ourselves towards the challenge, right? So if we approach it from the inside, from creativity, from questions, from wonder, um, we can still hold the sappo libra on the iceberg, we can still hold the rising seas, we can still hold the very real concerns and the changes that are coming, and we can sit with all of the things that we that we love about a woodlouse or a tree or your nan's window box or whatever it is. It's about going, ah, you know, and just allowing ourselves to feel that, feel the joy, feel that, you know, extraordinary passion that we might get when we just see something beautiful. And that's okay, that's necessary. We don't have to just beat ourselves over with the back with a stick all the time, going, it's terrible, everything's terrible. It is, it is terrible, and it's also beautiful, and that's what poems do. They give us all of it.

SPEAKER_01 37:43

If you'd like to know more about Hot Poets Collective and what's going to be going on on National Poetry Day, all the wondrous things that are going on on National Poetry Day, you can go to Hotpoets.org. Thank you both so much for joining us, Francesca Beard, Chris Redmond, and thank you for listening. Um, until next time.