911 verse

Prominent British poets have banded together to create an online anthology of poems called Emergency Verse: Poets in Defence of the Welfare State. The e-anthology was created  in protest of the coalition government's public spending cuts, and will be mass-emailed to the Prime Minister and other politicians this month.

Read more at the Guardian:

Morrison, 36, whose latest poetry volume, Keir Hardie Street, charts an odyssey through an imaginary utopian London, describes Emergency Verse as his "paper call to arms" over the "breakup" of the NHS and the "transparent unfairness" of George Osborne's emergency budget – which capped housing benefit and pegged future rises in welfare payments to the lower measure of inflation, the consumer price index.

"I felt it my duty to call on like-minded poets to join in a verse campaign against the emergency budget and in defence of the welfare state," he says. "Auden once said, 'Poetry makes nothing happen.' Audacious as it may sound, we're trying to prove poetry can make things happen. The power of words should not be underestimated: we need a Big Poetry to combat the Big Society, and I hope EV will help shape that fightback in verse."