Libraries Week - Thursday. It's National Poetry Day. Karen Smith of the National Poetry Library opens the doors to her magical library

From the Library With Love

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‘We run a ‘Lost Quote’ service here at the National Poetry Library,’ said Karen Smith, who also told me proudly that nothing feels as natural to her as being a librarian. Lucky Karen is surrounded by poetry books, 250,000 of them to be precise. ‘People contact us all the time. Today I have had two enquiries from people who are looking for poems. Sometimes they can remember one or two lines in a poem, but they don’t know who it is by or can’t remember the rest of it. Sometimes they are looking for using it at a funeral. It is very gratifying when you find that poem for someone and they can read it at their grandfather’s funeral.’
Karen, who did a masters degree in modern poetry, is the perfect person to be a poetry detective (there’s a novel right there) and has great success, using online databases, or sometimes just good old word of mouth by asking colleagues. They used to pin it on a noticeboard, now they are going to start putting Lost Quotes on the virtual noticeboard of Twitter.
I’d bet a lot of people, myself included, had never head of the National Poetry Library, Located in the Royal Festival Hall, looking over the Thames and filled with rainbow-coloured rolling stacks, it sounds almost dreamlike.
‘Anyone can visit and it is absolutely free,’ Karen insists. ‘We’ve so many treasures here. Poetry is a distillation of words. The white space on the page is important, the pauses and the unsaid part. I think that is what makes it poignant. A poem is emotionally powerful because it means something different to everyone, you see what you want to see.’
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