The Story So Far
 


The idea

I was talking about poetry to Paul in a pub. We were on the second pint. Paul was a Community Psychiatric Nurse (CPN), who also practiced as a counsellor in GP practices. People would wait in the doctor's waiting room for their sessions with Paul.

I was saying that poetry doesn’t reach out far or wide enough. And poetry books and the small poetry magazines are insufficient - too narrow and private a way of sharing rich and living language, with its power to illuminate, liberate and connect. “How else to broadcast ? Where else does poetry belong ?” I asked. “Ah, now...what about the waiting room wall ?” suddenly said Paul.

The Pilot

“Poems for the Waiting Room” was piloted in London in 1997, supported by Chris Meade, Director of the Poetry Society at the time. I made a tentative phone call to him and there and then he agreed to help, even before we had met.

The pilot lasted a year and culminated in an article in “The Guardian” Society pages by a free-lance reporter called Eileen Fursland. The article produced an enthusiastic response from across the country and almost certainly secured the project's future funding prospects. (Further articles have appeared since – in the national press, in local newspapers, in medical journals).

Following the pilot, Alison Combes of the Arts Council convened a meeting near Birmingham to discuss the next step.

Besides myself, she invited the poet David Hart and a GP called Dr. Malcolm Rigler, one of the pioneers of the UK Arts/Health movement. At the meeting Malcolm suggested we apply to the King's Fund, who were interested in funding arts/health projects.

I in turn rather diffidently introduced an idea of my own - how about having poems about waiting displayed in healthcare waiting rooms, thereby offering a very present empathy to the reader ? Alison Combes siezed on the idea. She thought it might qualify for the Arts Council's "New Audiences" funding stream recently introduced.

Both proposals made at the meeting yielded fruit and led to two new collections.





The Arts Council “New Audiences” collection of commissioned poems - "Poems for...waiting"

In 1999, David Hart was asked to commission fifty new poems for the project, each on the subject of waiting. Some are by well-known poets, others by unknown. It was an exciting few weeks. David didn't just approach people for a poem and then make a judgement, but worked alongside many of them as their contributions came to fruition, acting as critic, guide, almost midwife. There are perhaps others in the country who could have performed David's role with equal success - could have achieved a similar spread and balance and level of work. But I suspect not many. And I believe none who could have surpassed his editing achievement.

David has written about his work with the fifty poets who contributed to the collection. You can read it it here.

Here and here are examples of the "Poems for...waiting" collection.

The King’s Fund collection - "Poems for...all ages"

A further two years’ funding from the King’s Fund produced a second collection, this one similar in range to the celebrated "Poems on the Underground" collections. The "Poems on the Underground"anthology was in fact a major help in our search for material, and so was that other marvellous anthology "The Rattlebag" edited by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. Several old favourites are included in the collection and also ten especially for young children. A group of interested healthcare receptionists and administrators based in Kensington and Hammersith helped with the poems' selection.

Our basic poster design was finalised as this collection was being brought together. The decision was made in time for the "New Audiences" collection to share it.

An evaluation was conducted towards the end of the two years, its approach and implementation greatly assisted by Dr Gillie Bolton. The report can be accessed here

Here and here are poems from the "Poems for...all ages" collection.

The Foreign Office “EU Enlargement” collection

In 2003, I wrote to the then Minister for Europe, Denis Macshane. In consequence, the Foreign Office helped to fund the selection and printing of ten new bilingual poems – one from each of the countries joining the European Union in 2004. The original poem was printed on the left in each case – with the English translation beside it. The poet and editor Fiona Sampson was of crucial help in the making of this collection.

The Foreign Office held an Open Day to celebrate the 2004 EU Enlargement. It was a chilly but sunny Spring day. The Victorian splendour of those offices on King Charles Street played host to around 5,000 visitors. A significant stop-off point on the organised tour were the ten EU bilingual poem-posters enlarged to AO size and displayed on large screens set in parallel down the centre of the famous Durbar Room. They looked superb (and quite at home in their surroundings).

Here is an example of one of the poems.

Poems that celebrate diversity - "Poems for...one world"

The Baring Foundation, NHS Estates and the Arts Council funded an expansion of the bilingual collection. In 2005, the ten Enlargement poems were joined by thirty five more poems, in languages ranging from Albanian to Vietnamese and including Arabic, Hindi, Hungarian, Kurdish, Mandarin, Punjabi. Like the earlier bilingual poems, each of these is accompanied by a translation set out alongside. The poets Debjani Chatterjee and Stephen Watts were my guides and mentors for this collection.

The combined “Diversity Collection” of 45 bilingual poems was launched by the Poet Laureate Andrew Motion in October 2005 at the Central Middlesex Hospital in West London. The launch left behind ten of the poems on permanent display in the Acad building there.

Here and here are examples of the latest bilingual poems.

The three main collections described above form a combined pack of 145 poems. I like to send them all out together. I assume an interested person in each site, willing to give time and interest to choosing the most suitable poems, and maybe even rotating them, so that they stay “live” for staff and visitors alike.

Readings and the Mayor of London

There have been other ventures besides the poem-posters. For instance, in the first three months of 2002, several poets, including Andrew Motion, Moniza Alvi, Caroline Carver, Debjani Chatterjee, David Hart and Fleur Adcock, took part in readings in South London health sites, to promote the poem collections. There were visits to six sites in all, accompanied by a photographer Pierre Bascle. Click here, here and here for three examples of the visual records we made of the visits, using Pierre’s pictures. Also, individual pictures you can see on the site come mostly from these readings.

My favourite is the dancing nurse. It was taken towards the end of the weekly Fracture/Chronic Pain Clinic in Bexley.

The south London project owed much to the support of Mark Homer, then the Arts Co-ordinator for the London Borough of Croydon.

Another initiative took place in 2007, when ten bilingual poems were contributed to that year's Mayor of London's Equalities Report. Each poem is by a Londoner and is accompanied by a photograph of the poet taken against a London setting of that person's choosing. Photographs were by Hugh Hill. The non-English languages represented were : Ewe, Hindi, Latin, Mandarin, Persian, Punjabi, Scots, Shona, Somali, Turkish. Two of the poems were by people with mental health problems. Another was written originally in sign language. Here is the collection - a total in the end of twelve poems. These were later put together into an A5 pamphlet.

Plans and Possibilities

In the Spring of 2008, the time of the launch of this web-site, two further initiatives are coming to fruition.

One is an audio version of some of the bi-lingual poems already produced, funded by the Department of Health Equalities and Human Rights Group. The audio is intended for NHS patients unable to read a poster displayed on a wall, for whatever reason.

A second collection of specifically bilingual poems is also being produced, including some written in the main African languages. We hope to continue to distribute these poems very widely.

Bus videos are another possibility. So are blank London walls…

In the years the project has been functioning, the poems have mostly appeared in health and social care settings—health centres, social care centres, hospitals and hospices. But they’s also been seen in :

Poems For… and “Poems in the Waiting Room”

Poems For…(lately "Poems for the Waiting Room") is not to be confused with a separate project called "Poems in the Waiting Room." This latter project supplies brochures of several poems at a time on a quarterly basis, usually to GP surgeries. Most of the material chosen for the brochures comes from the canon of traditional English poetry, though recently more contemporary work has been included. Patients can take the brochures home with them.

I hope our own change of title will help off-set any confusion there has sometimes been over the earlier similarity of names.