Let's put poetry in motion on a day to celebrate its treasures

It's National Poetry Day. All over the country, poetry is happening – slam events, poets visiting schools, gangs of poets reading from some prestigious stages, poems broadcast on the radio. Even the odd poet let loose to write a piece for a popular newspaper.

I'd like to think that someone, somewhere, might even be sitting down with a book of poems and reading it. Quietly.

For poets National Poetry Day can feel a bit bleak. The big day comes, and there have been no invitations. There's nothing in the diary. We can't open a paper, turn on the TV or go to the pub without hearing one of our rivals (and we do think of them that way, today) doing something for an audience.

It's a little like Valentine's Day for the newly-split-up. What is there to do but hide in the house and pretend you never liked poetry anyway?

Even when a poet does have something in the National Poetry Day diary, it's not always the glittering prize we were hoping for.

Soon after the publication of my first book, I was asked to give a National Poetry Day interview for a radio station. I was travelling by train from Exeter to York at the time, and it was decided that we'd try the interview by phone. From a moving train. Going through tunnels.

The interviewer asked me a difficult first question – "What is poetry for?" or something similar, and off I went.

I talked for a good few minutes, then there was silence at the other end of the phone. I thought I'd wowed my interviewer speechless. Alas, no. My phone had cut out as soon as I'd started talking, and the radio station had abandoned the interview.

I hereby apologise to my fellow passengers for that sudden, very loud (and probably very pretentious) four-minute lecture on The Uses of Poetry.

So what is all this annual fuss about? What's National Poetry Day for? What is poetry for, come to that?

There are hundreds of books of poems published every year, but they don't sell much. Your average poet is pretty happy to sell a few hundred copies of her latest slim volume.

And yet, how many of us could truthfully say that we've never written a poem? Or tried to write a poem? Even just once?

We turn to poetry instinctively. It's as if we need it. At all the big moments, the turning-points of our lives, we reach for it. Falling in love, splitting up, losing loved-ones, welcoming new lives into the world, witnessing national disasters – they all inspire us to create poetry.

All this goes back a long way. In the beginning we used poetry as a way of remembering who we were. We handed tales of ourselves down the generations and, because we hadn't invented the pen, we had to remember them. So we made them rhyme. That helped.

Without that oral tradition of poetry, our understanding of our own ancient history would be immeasurably poorer. And that's true all over the world.

The brilliant Scottish poet Don Paterson once said: "A poem is just a little machine for remembering itself. The one unique thing about our art is that it can be carried in your head in its original state, intact and perfect." Poetry can comfort us, console us, remind us that we're not alone. It can cheer us up. It can make us cry with laughter and cry with sorrow. It can make us see familiar things in new ways. It can tell us the truth about ourselves. It can catch lightning in a bottle. Herd cats.

So it saddens me to hear people say, "No one's written a good poem since Philip Larkin," or "modern poets are rubbish because they don't rhyme". And I do hear that. A lot. It saddens me because it makes me think that those people have simply given up on poetry. They're missing out.

I was asked recently if I wanted to "raise the profile" of poetry on National Poetry Day. I had to say "no". Poetry's got a perfectly massive profile. A hundred per cent of the population knows that poetry exists. Its profile, in that sense, couldn't be healthier.

What I'd like National Poetry Day to do is help every single person discover that there's at least one poet out there whose work you will love. Some rhyme, some don't; some are complex, some are plain-speaking; some are mischievous, some are well-behaved. You know, just like normal people...

Just this week at the Ilkley Literature Festival, I've seen 500 people weeping with laughter at Brian Patten's poetry and sat among 100 primary-age children and their parents, joining in with the Jamaican patois poems of the wonderful Valerie Bloom.

My favourite moment, though, was on a much smaller scale. I was discussing some poems by Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy with a dozen people. There was some heated debate – we didn't agree about everything – but it was fun.

People enjoy getting to grips with poetry. You could. Happy National Poetry Day!

Antony Dunn is Poet in Residence at this year's Ilkley Literature Festival (October 1 – 17), and his latest book of poems, Bugs, was published in 2009 by Carcanet OxfordPoets.