Poetry Club at the Local Library

These are unsettling times by all accounts, according to any current news you may come across. 

Life can take a lot to process.

Yet every first Wednesday of the month at my local library, after hours, a few of us gather to do just that. 

But voluntarily?  With enjoyment? Just what is going on here?

Affairs, high jinks, death, love stories, murder…. it’s all included.

Entering the building, each member of our poetry group escapes their daily worries and cares to inhabit a new creative space where literally anything could manifest via the written word, if only for ninety minutes. 

Ordinary-looking people settle in a meeting room, dropping bags and discarding raincoats, ready for the evening’s drama to unfold, expecting the unexpected - prepared.

We bring two poems each, either our own choice from poetry in the public domain or that which we have written ourselves, and copies for each of the group. Taking turns to read our selections aloud, a period of silence often follows as we all take in what we have heard and read. 

Sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, at times educating, or perhaps revealing the ephemeral beauty of the everyday, unravelling discourse often follows these moments of suspension to reveal layer after layer of interpretation, truth, wisdom, and understanding, encapsulated in ways that seem somehow impossible to otherwise describe.

And in dissecting the words we also share parts of ourselves as we time travel, explore and inhabit characters and perspectives, seek resolution, and thrash it all out on the sawdust of the poetic arena. 

It is said that once you share a poem you have written it takes on a life of its own - it is no longer ‘yours’.  It takes a brave poet to free their soul this way.  Even sharing a published poem from a famous writer can be an act of courage.  Your choices will always reveal something of yourself. 

Here is a stadium for the everyday champions of Lancaster town. 

But perhaps the true value of this group is that in discord and agreement we capture the essence of what it means to connect.  We are seen and heard, a trust which ebbs, flows, and builds over time.  For ninety minutes we discuss, gain insight, laugh, explore, dream without limits and generally find relief from the worries of the world.

This may not be the stuff of which headlines are made yet as the meeting closes, and until the next time, we put on our everyday clothes once more and fade into the night….like superheroes.