Thursday October 4 See www.poetrysoc.com

It’s the clattering, insistent rhythm of horses’ hooves pounding against the sand that drives Katrina Porteous’s latest poem, “Beach Ride”. Commissioned by BBC Radio 4 for this year’s National Poetry Day, “Beach Ride” is one of 10 short poems specially written for broadcast next Thursday, in response to the day’s theme: journeys (surely a winner for assemblies).

Each poem has been inventively recorded to show poets in transit. Edwin Morgan studies the backs of passengers’ necks on a Glasgow bus. Gwynneth Lewis is storm-besieged on a sailing boat. Amarjit Chandan writes in Punjabi to the rattle of a London Tube train. And Katrina Porteous rides full-pelt along the Northumbrian seashore.

“When you’re galloping, hurtling forwards, you can almost feel time streaming by,” says Porteous. “That’s the journey of my poem - riding as an image for history, time passing and where we’re going.”

Porteous has only recently taken up riding again, borrowing a horse, Hannah, from the local stables every Monday, for a wind-racked dash along the beach. “I write a lot when I’m walking,” she says. “I need to hear the sound of the poem in my head.” For the BBC commission, she carried her tape recorder on horseback, experimenting with the rhythms of trotting, cantering and walking. “Back home, listening to the tape, I decided the gallop was the most interesting and I wrote a chant with the gallop sound in it, which is the constant thread running through the freer rhythm of the main poem.” Beneath this is a third chant, written in Northumbrian dialect. “As the fresh a the born, As the range a the sea, As the bend a the tide, As the spuggie maa’n flee (as the sparrow must fly).”

Many poets find train journeys provide a useful space for writing. Perhaps it’s the sense of in-between-ness that allows the mind to soar. Or perhaps it’s just that today’s poets spend so much of their lives shuttling back and forth between residencies, readings and school visits.

Testing the creative power of the train, Scotrail has donated a carriage on the 10.30am shuttle between Edinburgh Waverley and Glasgow Queen Street for National Poetry Day. Year 6 pupils from Preston Street primary in Edinburgh will spend the journey writing poems with five Scottish writers including Dilys Rose and Jonathan Meres.

The poets plan to write a collective poem during the 45-minute journey, based on a traditional Japanese form called a renga - essentially an interactive series of linked haikus in which each poet responds to the verse before. “You keep moving it on, and another will keep coming towards you,” Dilys Rose explains. Having control of an entire compartment particularly appeals to Rose. “I always try to write on trains, but it’s a lot more difficult nowadays, with so much electronic noise from mobile phones and laptops.”

Jonathan Meres (author of the Yo! Diary teen novels published by Piccadilly) says: “I always take a notebook on a train. I’m always full of good intentions, full of ought-tos. But come King’s Cross or wherever, I have never written anything. I am always thinking about ideas though, and it’s a treat to be able to read a book in peace.”

Jonathan Meres and Dilys Rose (author of the collection When I Wear my Leopard Hat) are among the 10 writers whose poems on the theme of journeys are being distributed on free postcards across Scotland (see www.scottish booktrust.com). “Journeys are such a universal theme,” says Meres, who joined the Merchant Navy as a 16-year-old. “There isn’t a child who hasn’t been on a journey, even if it is a journey to the postbox or from the sofa to the television set. Sometimes armchair journeys, spent dreaming, are the best.”

You can hear Katrina Porteous’s poem on BBC Radio 4, 6.29pm on October 4. Chat to Poet Laureate Andrew Motion on BBC Online at 3.45pm, or vote for the nation’s favourite children’s poem. Details on www.bbc.co.ukcbbc