More Poetry for the Portico Prize for Young Writers

The events for 2011's Portico Prize for Young Writers were filled with poetry, from Kate Fox's Library Light at the Awards Evening to Manchester based performance poet Kieren King's specially commissioned poem The Portico which he performed at the closing event.  As Vice-Chair Lynne Allan put it, Kieren "brilliantly and cleverly wove together all the elements of the Library's past, present and future and memorably performed his poem on the evening".  Kieren is the 2012 champion of The Bilston Love Poetry Slam and a member of Working Verse with Dave Viney and Benny-Jo Zahl, with whom he's acted in Amateur Thematics at The Lowry (2012) and is currently working on Working Verse's first collection of verse. The closing event for the Portico Prize for Young Writers was a success with the young writers, their families, the mentors, judges and teachers. And generous sponsor of both the Library and the Portico Prize, Sir John Zochonis was in attendance.

Dai Owen, a great supporter of the Library,
 produced some fantastic sketches of the evening.

The Portico by Kieren King

You can keep your Kindle
It doesn't smell
Like a book smells
Doesn't feel
Like a book feels
I'd rather flick pages
Than touch screens
So under this dome
Flanked by these tomes

I feel home

As I spies

With my two eyes

Previous winners of the Portico Prize

I do wonder

Were these writers ever haunted

By the ghosts of aspiring writers

Past, present and yet to come

Not burdened by chains

But weighed down

By the books that went unwritten

The ideas they pushed aside

The stories they never told

Met too many unceasingly soused scribblers

Perpetual pub philosophers

Rhapsodising random rhetoric

About the opus that they're "working on"
Paper in the left hand
Pen in the right
And ne'er the twain shall meet

Through the best of times and the worst of times

Writers write

Though every flash of inspiration

Is punctuated by a thousand false starts

Writers write

Through blocks, wrong turns and dead ends

Writers write

Even if there's something good on telly

So we're here to celebrate our Northern identity
Its cultural legacy
And your literary quality

It's not so grim up North

It's not flat caps and whippets

It's splitting the atom

Who will join the winners that came before?
Who will have me begging

Please sir can I have some more?