I have no shame in writing about blunders, mistakes, and things I could’ve done differently when running my poetry series, now called Sac Poetry, formerly called Scriptorium Saturday. Not to say I’m doing everything correctly now. But building a poetry community has been, and continues to be, lesson after lesson after lesson.
This is the first post of that “lessons” series, mostly to reflect in hopes that whatever it is you start—since everyone nowadays wants to start stuff—some of these considerations may be helpful. But this one is especially for a niche group of people – those who want to start a poetry community but don’t know many poets.
This post is about 12 years in the making, but really about nine active years in the making. And this particular realization took me over a decade.
For the past 12 years, I have been trying to build a poetry series without much of an audience of poets. Really, without a community of poets.
There are different reasons people have come to my poetry events over the years, and most seem to have to do with one of three things: they know me personally, they knew the featured poet if there was one, or they found Scriptorium/Sac Poetry online.
But coming to an event once—which is probably about 90% of those who have come—and coming again and again are different outcomes. Neither is bad. It depends on what your goals are. But if you’re trying to build continuity and nearly everyone comes only once, there may be something there to understand.
The very small number of people who do come again and again know me personally. And I love it. The challenge, though, is that 99.9% of the people I know personally are not poets. My mailing list is mainly, I think, friends, family, and a growing number of people who have found Scriptorium/Sac Poetry along the way. There may be other kinds of writers and artists on the list as well. But to be honest, my mailing list, which is under 180 people, has a very small number of poets.
And here I am offering and pushing poetry events to that same audience.
The problem isn’t necessarily the events. There is a mismatch between what I am offering and the audience I am repeatedly offering it to.
For a long time, I thought I was doing something wrong with the events themselves. So I kept changing things. I even opened the events up beyond poetry a little bit, which probably made things worse. I remember a few people remarking, “I thought this was poetry?”
But the issue isn’t what I am offering. I just hadn’t really understood who I was offering it to. My audience is largely not poets. And what I’ve come to believe is that if you want to build a poetry series around experiences that ask people to participate in poetry, you need some poets—or at least people who genuinely want to engage with poetry—to help build it. Friends, family, colleagues, and people who are simply curious can absolutely be part of it. But curiosity and participation are different things.
Over the years, I’ve generally done three types of events: featured poets, open mics, and workshops.
A featured poet doesn’t necessarily require an audience deeply interested in poetry. There’s a low barrier to entry. You can be a spectator. You can be casually interested. You don’t have to share poetry, write anything, or participate. You can just sit there and listen.
But a poetry open mic or workshop? Those experiences generally need people who actually want to engage with poetry.
And I was marketing all three formats to essentially the same people—people who were largely not poets—and they wouldn’t come. And honestly, if I weren’t a poet, I probably wouldn’t either. Let alone come again and again.
My two biggest poetry events were actually my first and third, back in 2014. They took place at a venue with beautiful lighting, music, food, atmosphere, curtains, sofas, you name it.
People came.
And then most of them didn’t come back.
Granted, maybe I didn’t have everyone’s email address or contact information, though they were always invited to leave it if they wanted. But for years, I wondered how to recapture what happened at those first events. Now, I’m not sure there was anything to recapture. Some people knew me. Some knew the featured poets. Some found the events online. Some were family. They came, they enjoyed themselves, and then they went about their lives. They weren’t necessarily there because they were poets or wanted an ongoing relationship with poetry. Yet I assumed that was true and went on campaigning, promoting, and offering poetry events as though those same people were an audience for poetry.
Honestly, this has taught me to start with the community I actually have, not the audience I imagine I’m speaking to.
If the people around you aren’t particularly interested in poetry, think about what might give them an entry point. Maybe it’s a fascinating person, an interesting subject, music, or conversation. It may not be poetry itself that gets them through the door, but some other curiosity you can awaken in them, something convenient or practical, or something else they can expect from the experience.
I actually think there’s something poetic about that. Be open to all the ways you might invite people to encounter poetry, no matter how seemingly inconsequential.
What you create doesn’t have to look like a traditional poetry reading, open mic, workshop, or performance. Work with what you have, where you are. Make space for people to experience poetry, even if poetry is only one part of something else.
Though I host poetry gatherings, most of the people my outreach currently reaches aren’t poets. I’d like to reach more poets, but the community immediately around me is not largely made up of poets. It includes family, friends, associates, and people in the broader community—people who may enjoy poetry or simply be willing to experience it. I still want to bring poetry to them. That means I have to think about how I invite people into poetry when poetry itself may not be enough to bring them through the door. I can’t necessarily rely on Come see this amazing poet, by itself, or Come do this poetry workshop, by itself.
Instead, I’ve been creating free, low-pressure, conversational gatherings at local libraries, with food, where we can simply sit around a table together. Poetry brings us into the room, but it doesn’t always have to dictate everything that happens once we’re there. The conversations can move in different directions, and I just go with the flow of where people take them. Poetry becomes the convener, while the gathering becomes whatever the people around the table need it to become.
And maybe that openness is part of what makes room for poetry. People don’t have to identify as poets to have something inside them worth noticing or expressing. Everyone has a voice. Everyone notices things. Everyone has emotions, relationships. Everyone has a life.
That has expanded how I think about bringing poetry to people. Maybe our work isn’t always to convince people to come to poetry. Maybe, as poets, we can create spaces where people can notice, express, listen, and be open to how poetry can meet them there.