TEXTING may not seem to have much to do with poetry, especially if your experience of poetry is limited to learning verse by rote at school.

But, in one of several innovations at this year’s Ledbury Poetry Festival, the event is bringing the two together in a text poems contest.

Texting poets are invited to test their ingenuity, creativity and their thumbs to write poems in either plain English or shorthand English within the text message limit of 160 characters.

Also new this year is the introduction of the Festival Goers Room, a place to relax between events, read poetry books and magazines and meet other poetry lovers.

Or, in marked contrast, writers can join Dave Reeves and Lucy Lomas in an extreme writing workshop, The Dark Write of the Sole, on Saturday, July 12, from 11.15pm.

Participants in the workshop will walk through the night, with writing stops along the way.

The development of the festival, the UK’s premiere poetry festival, has been helped by an Arts Council grant which secures the event’s future for the next three years.

“It’s really fabulous,” says festival director Chloe Garner, as the start of her second festival approaches, “another three years of knowing the support is there.

“The climate was bad at the time and nobody was guaranteed funding.”

Some of the Arts Council funding will be used to literally ‘fly the flag’ for the festival, making its presence in the town more visible with the addition of batik flags made by students at John Masefield School. There are 10 huge flags this year, which in time will become 30.

“We also want to commission someone to make Burgage Hall more of a visual feast and lift the profile,” says Chloe.

“The grant also enables us to carry on with the schools and community work of the festival as before, with projects including Herefordshire Council’s creative writing classes for migrant workers and the adult literacy programme.”

For Chloe Garner, the great thing about the poetry festival is the chance it offers to hear poetry read by its authors as it was intended to be heard.

“When you hear a poet read his or her poetry, it’s a very different thing from reading it.

“John Agard’s work, for example, is so different (when read by him) from what is on the page.”

John Agard is appearing on Saturday, July 5, from 10.30am.

Colwall poet Norman Buller, who will be reading from his work on Friday, July 11, at 12.15pm is in total agreement, pointing out that poetry was originally an entirely oral tradition, never written down.

“If you hear poems read appropriately, they take on a dimension not to be found on the printed page,” he says, citing Gerard Manley Hopkins’ response to Robert Bridges’ reaction to his work: “Read me with the ears as I always wish to be read and my verse becomes alright.”

Norman, who in the 1950s was part of a writing circle that included Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, had his first full collection of poems, Sleeping with Icons, published in 2007 and his second collection, Fools and Mirrors, will be published at the end of the year.

For full details of this year’s packed programme, visit poetry-festival.com. To enter the text poems contest, text your poem to 07970 356855 by midnight on July 13.