Click on the headings in the left hand margin of this page for the story of the project, its funding, where the poems have gone, etc.
Here I would like to set out the aims of this project.
The starting point is a belief that poetry matters and can play a role in offering vital connection between people, "making precious the space between us," cutting through the Sell and Spin that fills so much of everyone's day and does so much to reduce and isolate us all. A good poem offers rich and truth-loving communication, the currency of community. If a poem really succeeds in speaking to people, it can bring them back to themselves and renew hope.
One early impetus for the project was simply to widen the way poetry is broadcast and widen the audience it can reach and speak to. If indeed it matters, poetry should not restrict itself to the specialist bookshop or literary festival. Its audience should not be restricted to the class-room and fellow-poets !
A second impetus derives from my own observations as a social worker over the years - that institutions seeking to support and heal often also de-personalise and reduce. In the waiting room too easily I become nothing more than my presenting symptom, a mere name in a queue of parts. So poems displayed in the waiting room can perhaps help correct that distortion, and offer recognition of the whole person, not just a set of symptoms but also a weaver of my own particular dreams and carrier of my own particular history. The posters can help make the waiting room a more sensitive interlude for people, a time that might even be fertile.
Quickly it became evident that for the project to rely on the the traditional canon of English poetry as I was taught it at school would a/ deprive us of the enormous richness available from other cultures and histories, and b/ fail to recognise that those same cultures and histories are here and now in many an NHS waiting room and NHS staff team. In the words of David Hart : "we have the chance here to open people's lives to each other.." So at present we are concentrating on the bilingual aspect and will do so for a while yet. And this in turn has led us to other settings for display, such as schools and libraries, where the bilingual poem-posters also speak eloquently and urgently to their audience, making and renewing connection.
Finally I should say here that the project continues to rely on individuals who act as expert guides in the matter of poem selection. They are immersed in the material and the networks in a way that I am not and I am duty-bound to name them here. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes (for their "Rattlebag" selection !). and Judith Chernaik and colleagues (for their continually inspiring and impeccable "Poems on the Underground" selections). More directly, David Hart, Fiona Sampson, Debjani Chatterjee and Stephen Watts have worked closely with me on the various collections, to my personal great reward and the project's great benefit. Many others have offered crucial help and continue part of this story.
