Almost all of us had a relationship with poetry and for most of us it ended somewhere around Class 8 or 9. Poetry was a thing we were handed in a classroom and asked to decode - what is the poet trying to say, what does the imagery signify, the subtle meanings underlying a verse etc. Then school finished and the poems stopped, and what stayed behind was a quiet belief that poetry belongs to people who understand it, and that we are not those people.

But something else is true at the same time. The forties and fifties are when people start running out of ordinary language. A parent begins to fail. A child leaves. Ambition cools into something less urgent and harder to name. A marriage settles into a shape nobody quite chose. These are not situations that respond well to advice or to a wellness framework. They are situations that respond to somebody having already said the thing, precisely, a hundred years ago, in eleven lines.

That is what poetry is actually for, and it is the one form we have been quietly told we are not qualified to enjoy. So, the barrier here is not interest. It is permission. And the whole design of this experience is an attempt to remove the requirement to be clever about poetry, so that people can simply be moved by it.

A room of about 15-20 people spends an evening reading poems out loud to each other. That is the entire proposition because the plainness is the appeal.

Gulshan Walia, a poet and a member of the Aprisio community, reads three poems she has chosen and opens each one up for a conversation - not an analysis, a conversation. Everybody in the room has brought a poem of their own, and everybody reads theirs. And in the last stretch of the afternoon, Gulshan talks for ten minutes about how a poem actually gets made, and then the room tries to make one.

Nobody is asked to perform. Nobody is asked to explain. Nobody is asked to have an opinion about metre.

Arrival

People come in and write two things on a card: their name, and the title of the poem they have brought. The cards go on the table. It gives everyone something to do with their hands and it quietly signals that everybody really did bring one.

Opening

Gulshan sets the frame, and the frame is the most important ten minutes of the day. The message is roughly: we do not have to understand a poem to be allowed to like it, we will not be asked to interpret anything, and there is no wrong reaction. Said plainly, this releases about eighty percent of the anxiety in the room.

The Three Poems

Gulshan reads three poems by three different poets, roughly five minutes each, and opens each one with a question.

The Poem You Carry

Everyone reads the poem they brought, with one sentence on why they chose it. Roughly two and a half minutes each. Gulshan responds to each with a word or two - a response, not an assessment - and moves on.

How a poem gets made

Gulshan’s ten minutes on composition.

Writing, in fours

The room splits into small groups and writes something together.

Each group gets a constraint - a supplied first line, an object on the table, four words that must appear. Constraint is what makes this playful rather than frightening. Groups that want to read theirs out do; groups that would rather not, don’t.

This is for the person who has a poem saved in their phone notes and has never told anyone. The person who underlined something in a book in 1998. The person who can still recite four lines their grandmother used to say and does not know where they are from. The person who reads a poem on Instagram, feels something, scrolls on, and feels slightly foolish about it.

It is also for people who write - quietly - and have never read a line of it to anybody.