The People’s Bookshop is a perfect room. It needs repeating; the People’s Bookshop is a perfect room. Through its roof-top windows, reminiscent of a Parisian attic, sunlight flows and pools on the wooden panels, warming your feet. Overcast, a grey-blue wash is thrown across the floor, as bracing as a heron’s flight.
Sound travels in close spirals through the room as if hemmed in by falling snow. It is an air where everything and nothing is amplified – the intent listener is gifted sound whilst a dreamer can zone out, drifting from the copy on the spine of a book to their inner most thoughts.
The bookshop is wonky but in a perfect kind of way. A slight incline – some quirk of a carpenter amplified over the years – has gifted the room a democratic stage. One where, back-lit by the setting sun, the performer holds a glorious court. Indeed, the room does not insist you speak at speed – the world is not for rushing. Instead, the speaker is encouraged to ebb their talk, leave gaps for a silence, which, thickly cut, transmogrifies the audience from many into a single body.
For all these reasons, it is a room purpose-built for spoken-word. And it is for this reason that ‘is broken’ and People’s Bookshop decided to start a monthly spoken-word event: People’s Poetry (is broken).
So far, we have had three events. Both have seen a bright mix of contemporary work from students and locals, professionals and amateurs; all in harmony with the radical insights of the political books and a small, but growing, selection of poetry that Graham Grundy (the manager) curates. And when I say curates, I mean curates: the bookshop has also began to use its wall spaces to host the work of local artists.
I shall not run through and critique each speaker at The People's Poetry; Like the room, I shall leave you the space to enjoy the words. Below is a link to an archive containing every poem spoken at People’s Poetry. Long may the People’s Bookshop and People’s Poetry live on!