What happens when you connect one poet to another to think about a theme? And what then happens when you ask them to create a poem together? Does poetry itself create common ground that rises above differences in background, culture and identity – a shared space that is human and universal?
26 Connections shows the results. Here 13 alumni of the Barbican Young Poets programme were paired with 13 from the writers’ group 26. The theme they were asked to focus on was Human.Kind – the theme of the 2024 Bloomsbury Festival.
The poems demonstrate the power of people coming together to explore the potential of creative collaboration. Each pair has written a poem together, and they have also written an essay to describe the process. We will be posting these essays daily from 30th September in the lead-up to the festival. The poems will be shown at an exhibition at the Building Centre, Store Street, throughout the festival until mid-November. At that exhibition you can also see visual interpretations created by artists from the Lettering Arts Trust.
We are also working towards an anthology of the poems with a foreword by Rosemary Richards, festival director.: “To see the collaborative poetic responses from the Barbican Young Poets and 26 writers is to understand how deep this journey can take us, and how the world can be reflected in new forms of writing”.
The initiative was created by Jacob Sam-La Rose, leader of the Barbican Young Poets programme, and John Simmons, co-founder of 26. Thanks to the poets who collaborated so well.
