Following the huge success of last year's series of short films, Mad for Arts, the Community Channel and Media Trust Productions have been asked to make five more films for Channel Five Television.

This year's theme is 'Mad for Poetry' and they are looking for people with experience of mental health issues with whom they can collaborate. They are looking for men and women of all ages from a broad spectrum of the community who have a strong interest in all kinds of poetry. Although the people who are in the films might themselves write poetry, the poets they choose to talk about should be well known to the general public.

They are asking people to send them a brief outline of how a poem or part of a poem (or even a song lyric) has either helped them to cope with their condition, reflects their experience, explained it in some way or made them laugh.
The films will be shown during the week following Mental Health Day on October 10th 2005.

Oberon by Spike Milligan

http://www.geocities.com/iplaylouder/MilliganS.html

The flowers in my garden grow down.

Their colour is pain

Their fragrance sorrow.

Into my eyes grow their roots

feeling for tears

To nourish the black

hopeless rose

Tulips by Sylvia Plath

http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/tulips.html

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year~old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free -
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.

Writing by Charles Bukowski

 http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Charles-Bukowski/211

Conceit by D H Lawrence

http://judithpordon.tripod.com/poetry/id219.html

 It is conceit that kills us

and makes us cowards instead of gods.

Under the great Command: Know thy self, and that thou art mortal!

we have become fatally self-conscious, fatally self-important, fatally entangled in the cocoon coils of our conceit.

Now we have to admit we can't know ourselves, we can only know about ourselves.

And I am not interested to know about myself any more,

I only entangle myself in the knowing.

Now let me be myself,

now let me be myself, and flicker forth,

Maya Angelou - Still I Rise

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Maya_Angelou/13470