National Poetry Day, the annual mass celebration of poetry and all things poetical, marked its 21st birthday on Thursday 8 October 2015. Cocommissioned by Thirteen Ways and The Space in partnership with Forward Arts Foundation and the BBC, a collection of stunning films featuring Sean Bean, Samantha Morton and Professor Stephen Hawking reading poems by Dylan Thomas, Hafez and Sarah Howe. What does it mean, to see the world as a poet does? The best responses to our Make Like A Poet digital challenge were blazed across Blackpool Lights on the day.

You can still download our free National Poetry Day anthology of Light Poems here, and check out the specially commissioned ‘Light‘ poems from the five Forward Prizes poets shortlisted for the First Collection Prize. The National Poetry Day Partners collaborated to create these fantastic free educational resources for primary and secondary schools. Every year, all are invited to join in, breaking with the tyranny of prose by thinking of a poem and sharing it imaginative ways, with the hashtags #nationalpoetryday and #thinkofapoem.

The airwaves were full of verse, while poetry-spouting flash-mobs and impromptu poetry festivals popped up in unexpected places, from train carriages to shops, streets, offices and waiting rooms. In schools and libraries, members of Chatterbooks book clubs plunged into poetry, while thousands of students marked the day with a Readathon. Using the theme, proprietors of lighting shops and lighthouses, opticians and photographers are among the professions participating. In Bristol, one of the National Poetry Day ambassadors, the poet Liz Brownlee even rounded up the city’s light workers – including an astronomer, a firefighter, a cosmologist, a fire-eater and many more – to read poems about light for films to be displayed on the Big Screen in the city centre. Dr John Cooper Clarke wrote the ‘Nation’s Ode to the Coast’, filmed beautifully by the National Trust.

On BBC Radio 4, Andrew Marr, Dominic West and some of Britain’s most-loved poets and performers marked the day by weaving poetry into the schedule from early morning until late at night. There was poetry for breakfast with Helen Mort, courtesy of Poet in the City. The Poetry Postie went on her morning rounds. The airwaves were poetry-filled on 6 Music and Radio 3 too. On Channel 4 the continuity was kept by poets. There was Poetry in the Piazza, the now traditional open mic in the middle of Covent Garden. The Scottish Poetry Library unveiled their Big Words on the Royal Mile, ‘Spiral’ by Elizabeth Burns was a huge poem that day. There was Night poetry and music. There was late night poetry, and jazz.

Alan Bennet reading Larkin on the Today programme. Michael Sheen and Aardman creating a short animation of Dylan Thomas poem. Thousands of participants sharing their favourite lines of poetry online in the  #thinkofapoem challenge. Poetry ambulances. Poetry police. Poetry fire-brigades. Poetry tube-stations. Poetry supermarkets, parks, bus-stops and post-boxes.

Poetry is the one art form you can keep in your head, and last year Cambridge University launched a massive Poetry and Memory survey on National Poetry Day to discover what poems the nation remembers.  Poetry is sticky and stays with you: surprise us with what you know.

Teachers and students can keep the NPD spirit alive all year by using our free activity/lesson plans and cool posters and sharing the fun via Twitter #thinkofapoem. You can still download a set of eight new poems for primary school children by five leading contemporary children’s poets.

We had Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas, read by the Prince of Wales (with the faintest of Welsh lilts). We commissioned a gorgeous 30 second animation. We had Carol Ann Duffy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sean O’Brien, Pam Ayres, Alice Oswald, Felix Dennis, Jo Shapcott, E J Thribb, Lemn Sissay, Simon Armitage, the Vogons, George the Poet…. We relished the Grimsby fishermen speaking the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, performance poets posted throughout the London underground, Jordan from Rizzle Kicks showing off his tattoo of Kipling’s If alongside Mr Gee at Wembley and the 24 hour incarceration of four Welsh poets, with pen, paper, coffee and orders to create 100 new poems. John Cooper Clarke, the original iconoclastic punk poet, was live-streamed  from Newcastle to 14 venues throughout the land – from Dundee to Southampton. A new Young Poet Laureate for London was announced at the House of Commons.  We assembled poems, films, lesson plans, activities  and posters here to help you celebrate with us and each other.

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We celebrated National Poetry Day 2012 on 4th October. Sparked from the theme of Stars, Inua Ellams staged an intergalactic interactive poem on Twitter. The Peace Camp tents came to Southbank Centre for a brief visit, and you could stargaze inside (see photo above). The Poetry Society’s NPD Live at Southbank Centre included Roger McGough, Grace Nichols, Rachel Rooney, Helen Mort and Christopher Reid.

We commissioned some star-studded lesson plans from Cheryl Moscowitz. You still can download theKS1 and KS2 here.

In 2011, we gamely celebrated National Poetry Day on 6th October. Carol Ann Duffy, poet laureate, read in The Big Tent in Wimbledon from her new collection ‘The Bees’. Wendy Cope hosted ‘Games People Play,’ her interpretation of the theme.

Katy Evans-Bush wrote a roundup of what poetry looks like on National Poetry Day: like “1,000 people at any given point in a whole afternoon, jammed into the most central open public building in London. We thought this only happened in the sixties! It was like Woodstock! Who says we can’t pull ’em in?”

The Telegraph reported on a poetical event in Lancashire. “Two rival car dealerships have declared a poetry war. Bowker BMW staff in Preston and Blackburn are currently engaged in a battle of rhyming couplets which began two weeks ago after each staff member was challenged to write and submit a short poem between four and 12 lines long. The poems have been shortlisted online for public vote and the winner will be announced on the 9th October. The prize? Glory for the dealership of course, oh and dinner for two at Huntley’s in Samlesbury.”