 Hello. My name is Caroline Byrd and I'm a poet and you may be forgiven for thinking that I'm in some kind of bunker or building a cardboard castle, but I've just moved house actually and behind me is my poetry library in boxes. If you can see, they're all piled up there as about 30 boxes. The removal men were very sweaty and slightly annoyed at the end of lugging it all into a van. My poetry library, I started collecting when I was about 13 when I bought my first poetry books. I remember opening a book by James Tate and it fell open to a middle poem. And the first line was, they got me because if the forest has no end, I'll go naked. They got me because if the forest has no end, I'll go naked. And what I loved about that line of poetry is I still don't entirely know what that means. I read it when I was 13, I'm now 33, and I'm still puzzling over that line. And I love that, I love the mystery of poetry. We don't stand in front of the ocean and go, but what does this mean? We enjoy the mystery of it, we enjoy the fact that we will never figure it out. And I have 30 books here, 30 boxes of books that are full of mystery and that makes me happy. As well as having lots and lots of books by other people, I have written six books of poetry and five plays, I think. And here, if you can see, is some of my notebooks. These are very private and I would be appalled if anyone, including my nearest and dearest, read them. In fact, some of them I haven't even read myself or gone back on myself. And my handwriting is absolutely shocking. Look at this. Allegeable, allegeable. I almost like it's written in code. And I remember when I was eight years old, I think, getting my first notebook and sitting with it behind my bunk bed on a beanbag. I'm tired because I've been moving house. And writing and writing and thinking, I can say whatever I want to these pages because this is just for me, this is just mine. And that's what's so important when you get your notebook to be writing just for yourself, even if eventually it might turn into a poem that you show to somebody. That's my gramophone. I'm a fan of big, useless, beautiful things. And even if, sorry, I got distracted, even if you do show it to somebody eventually, when you first start writing, it has to be born entirely in the privacy of your imagination. Right, so that one day you might have, I mean, I've got at least four more of these boxes of notebooks. And they're all full. I don't know what's in a lot of them. And they're very tatty. And some of them turned into poems. And some of them will always remain as scraps of things and promises and potential that never became. But that's the magic of it. People often say, get over the fear with a blank page. But I say that's not the way to look at it. The blank page is the best bit. The magic of poetry is that you create something from nothing. All of these books and all of these boxes started off as blank pages. And then suddenly all of these words appear just when we give ourselves permission. So the task I want to set you is quite simple. I want you to, first of all, get yourself a notebook. That is yours. Not for school. It's yours. You take it home. No one's allowed to look at it if you don't allow them. It's yours. Try and get someone to get it for you, ideally. But then write your name on it. Write top secret. That's it. And then on the first page I want you to write one line, a first line. And in that line I want you to have an image in terms of something you can see. So there is a frog playing cards on that car. There is a fire inside this matchbox. There is a diamond inside that man's tooth. Anything. Just something in that first line that is a picture that you can see in your mind's eye. And then after you've written that first line, not knowing where it came from, I want you to step through that line like it's a door into a world. And just keep writing. Keep going until you've filled that first page. And don't stop until it's filled. Or even especially if it's total nonsense. Just create something from nothing so that you've got your first messy page of your notebook. And then eventually it might turn into a whole book full of incredibly messy stuff that you can create poems from. The wonderful clutter of poetry that we then turn into crisp books that have that wonderful book smell. Anyway, I'm going to get back to unpacking now. Thank you. Bye.