Book Spine Poetry Competition to celebrate National Poetry Day

An invitation was emailed to all staff inviting them to visit the library with their class to take part in creating Book Spine Poetry to celebrate National Poetry Day on 8 October 2015.

Book Spine poetry is created by arranging book titles to make a poem, stacking the books so that the spines (with the book title visible) can be read from top to bottom.

Pupils worked in groups to create their own poems and were encouraged to use ANY book in the library, not just junior or senior fiction – even the staff CPD titles could be used!

They had a limit of 6 books (8 at the very most). Some pupils were a little unsure at first and tried to create a poem then looked for titles to match:

“Miss, I need a book called ‘A white light was shining in the sky’”

“Mrs Skinner, have you any books just called ‘the’?”

“I’m looking for a book with ‘and’ as a title”

Once that was overcome, pupils started to pull off books with interesting titles, or with a similar theme and then worked together to create their poem. Often, they had collected more books than they needed and began selecting which would work together to create the best line. They switched books about seeing how moving lines/book titles created different meaning and effect.

The complete poems were very cross curricular and covered a wide variety of subjects and themes: war, environmental issues, religion, self-esteem, space, and survival were some common topics. There were also several very imaginative poems covering genres such as horror, fantasy, romance and so on.

Finished poems were documented by photographs and pupils also wrote the poems down with a title to make it easier to judge.

Eleven classes from S1 to S4 took part in the competition and there were over 100 entries in total. A group of S6 pupils studying AH English selected winners from each year group certificates were presented to the winning teams.


Winning S2 poem

Self Esteem

Does my bum look big in this?
How embarrassing is that?
Blame my brain
The vintage girl
Standing alone
Are we having fun yet?





Pauline Skinner is the School Librarian at St.Margaret's Academy, West Lothian