"Wordsworth famously described poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’. The three big words have equal weight here, but ‘recollection’ has a particular significance: it makes clear that writing is essentially a re-claiming and in the process a re-making. Memory Cafés, where memories can be stored and examined and preserved, have the potential to be very important centres of poetic business. It’s this combination of the literary and the living that makes National Memory Day so important and original."