Firstly, I’d like to thank everyone who has supported our work this year – we really could not preserve this wonderful collection of poetry recordings without your help. It has been a very difficult year and in 2025 will continue to be tough as we continue our fund-raising drive to maintain and grow the Poetry Archive.

It might sound dramatic to say that people ‘need’ poetry, but the projects we have completed this year all prove the fantastically positive benefits which come from hearing a poet read their work. There is something about the act of listening to expertly crafted language that flips switches on in our brains and makes associations that surprise and enthral us.  If there are any researchers out there, we would love to collaborate on some substantial research to discover and measure these benefits – do get in touch if you can help!. We know how wonderful it is to have access to the Poetry Archive, and we will continue to work hard to try to keep going.  

This year’s Poetry Archive Now! open call attracted poets from all over the world. This unique poetry competition has created a collection in our YouTube channel which reflects the concerns and emotions of poets and poetry from many cultures. Poetry uniquely demonstrates again that we are more alike than different, wherever we are from. Look out for next year’s call, opening in June.  

This year over 4 million pages of poetry have been visited, read and listened to from our websites. The Children’s Poetry Archive continues to grow each year, and we think by the end of March 2025 it might even match the main Archive.  

Our educational resources have been downloaded from our TEACH area over 90,000 times. Teachers need free resources to help them share the love of poetry – and when a child is introduced to poetry as a fun and exciting thing to try, they will enjoy the love of poetry for the rest of their lives.  

At the end of last year we completed our project to launch our Membership Scheme with funding from the Garfield Weston Foundation. The Poetry Archive receives no regular funding and so it is you, our Members, who provide up to 50% of our Recording Programme budget to enable us to continue to collect new poems and preserve the ones we have.  We received funding from the Foyle Foundation to launch a collection of poetry in British Sign Language and we continue to work with the British Deaf Association to ensure poetry is accessible to everyone. We also received some special donations which we have added to our Supporters Wall.  

Coming up for 2025 

Our aims for 2025 remain ambitious. We are half way through our ‘Poetry of India’ collection, supported by the National Heritage Lottery Fund, which will bring together the stella names of Indian poetry who write in English, poets such as Tagore, Sampurna Chattarji, Adil Jussawalla, Bhanu Kapil, Arundathi Subramaniam, Jeet Thayil and many more. Look out for your special Member invitations to our launches of this special collection.  

We will focus on our Children’s Poetry Archive, aiming to add more poets and we are aiming to introduce a poetry competition for children.  We manage the publishing to Michael Rosen’s Children’s Poetry YouTube channel and we look forward to more films.  

As a registered Charity, we are grateful to our funders.  And once again, THANK YOU, from the Poetry Archive. You visit our collections, love our poetry and support us through Memberships or donations, and we really couldn’t do it without you!  

Have a happy happy holiday and a fantastic 2025.

Tracey Guiry,

Director of The Poetry Archive.