National Theatre partners with schools to mark World Poetry Day

To commemorate World Poetry Day, the National Theatre of Ghana is partnering a group of seasoned poets to mark this year's World Poetry Day with selected schools in Accra today, March 21.

UNESCO first adopted March 21 as World Poetry Day during its 30th General Conference in Paris, with the aim of supporting linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard.

Since its inception, Poetry Day is celebrated globally every year to promote the reading, writing, and teaching of poetry.

It is a day to appreciate the beauty of languages that connect people from different cultures.

The day also aims at preserving indigenous languages and cultures as well as to encourage the translation of poems from different languages to promote cross-cultural understanding.

The theme for this year's celebration is "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants".

In a press statement from the National Theatre, it described poetry as a type of literature that conveyed a thought, described a scene or told a story in a concentrated, lyrical arrangement of words.

"It is a beautiful form of expressing feelings and ideas in a unique and aesthetic manner. It creates a plethora of feeling and emotions. It explores the human condition and invokes emotion through words."

"Poetry can have a positive impact on the social and emotional learning of children by offering them a new way of thinking as well as building their grammar and listening skills.

"The National Theatre in partnership with a group of seasoned poets will engage the students in poetry writing techniques and also share their experience with the schools. They will further construct poems based on the theme for the year in a form of a competition," the statement read.