The Tribune

By EARYEL BOWLEG

Tribune Staff Reporter

ebowleg@tribunemedia.net

GLENYS Hanna Martin, Education, Technical and Vocational Training Minister, joined students at LW Young Junior High School yesterday to celebrate World Poetry Day.

Under the theme “Poetry: An Expression of the Soul”, students recited a variety of poems to commemorate the occasion.

Hope Strachan, Ambassador and Permanent delegate to UNESCO, read the remarks from the director of UNESCO cluster office for the Caribbean, noting that the organisation first adopted March 21 as World Poetry Day intending to support linguistics diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard.

“In this sense, the World Poetry Day is the occasion to honour poets, revive oral traditions, and identity of poetry recitals; promote the reading, writing, and teaching of poetry; foster the conversions between poetry and other arts such as theatre, dance, music and painting while raising the visibility of poetry in media,” she said.

Ms Hanna Martin told students the importance of art and that “the creative imagination is a place of freedom”.

“It has no boundary - your creative imagination has no boundary and it belongs exclusively to you,” she said. “Only you have your creative imagination. I urge you to tap into your creative energies and inspire, touch, move, excite the human spirit…”

She added: “As you know this is World Poetry Day and that might sound insignificant or off the wall or maybe boring, so to speak, but it’s very important because this causes us to celebrate our creative spirits as human beings - it draws upon the intangibles. I don’t know if you know what the intangibles are. It’s that part of being and make up that you can’t see or touch and fuels our spirits. Now we’re flesh and blood, but we’re also heart and soul.”