I confess, sometimes I forget that conversation with strangers is part of my creative practice. It sounds odd to put it like that, but it’s true – one of the ways I make art is to start by talking.

So for example, when I made and toured a spoken word theatre show to accompany the release of my first collection, The Trouble With Compassion, I spoke to groups of people about what compassion meant to them and incorporated their definitions into an audience-participation section of the show. I also spent some time with individuals, actively listening to them describe their perfect day, and then describing it back to them as a visualisation-meditation, which I recorded for them to use as a relaxation tape. On several other occasions, I’ve been commission to write poems based on group conversations about things like climate change; poems which have included verbatim phrases, or have been recorded, sampled, and turned into soundscapes.

So having my own ‘conversation bench’ at Middlesbrough Art Week was a natural addition to this practice. I spent a day inviting people to sit with me and choose a slip of paper from my bowl. On it they’d find a quote from a poem (mostly Mary Oliver poems) with something to say about loving this world. That would be our conversation prompt. The conversations themselves *were* the art, as far as MAW was concerned – but of course, I wrote small poems for them anyway, and here they are.

Beth Loves The World
“What do I eat and who do I stain?” – from Blackberries, by Mary Oliver

She knows the viscous crimson slime of viscera in the hand;
The tough tug of the knife from anus to silver throat, she knows.
She learned survival in the wild; but after that gutting she struck camp,
got hooked on videos of battery farms, and changed.
Nowadays when she comfort-eats, the lasagna is veggie.
Her kitchen is stocked with the fruit of family labours
on allotments, those scrappy remnants of the commons.
True sovereignty may well look like brambles – it would be good
if it were easy for everyone to live this way, if profit’s pressure
hadn’t uprooted us from a wholesome normality.
There must be something she can say in all this noise?
So many battles to pick, but one truth to hold tight –
she doesn’t want to stain this world with blood.

Asha Loves The World
“I had wanted an easy way out: decision on high, co-ordinated war effort: not how an ecosystem works” – from Cassandra: The Second End by Sasha West

Her feet hurt, and she has no words in my tongue to tell me
if the world will get better, or if this is as good as it gets;
a bench on which to rest in the flat white light of a Saturday mall,
easing the ache, surrounded by all the numb abundance.

For a while we try to open up single words like portholes
to call through, one world to another. Mum-dad-sister-wife-shopping.
Her ankles over her Sketchers are puffy as her winter jacket,
shapeless and durable as coats I’ve seen worn by rickshaw drivers
high up in the freezing villages above Manali. India? I try.

She spreads her stubby hands, to show each ashy knuckle
flashes garnets and coils of yellow Indian gold,
extravagant and bright as galaxies. She has no words
that I can understand to tell me about what she’s seen,
and if I could follow her, would I even believe it?

Katharine Loves The World
“Look, I want to love this world
as though it’s the last change I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it”
		from October by Mary Oliver

there is this world, and also
He has prepared a world to come

in that world there is gold and light
pure spirit and praise

in this world there are pangolins
and recycling bins

the daily effort to choose, to decide
living by His word

at the pulpits a call is rising
for all to be stewards of Creation

by reducing
single use plastics

not spiritual enough! 
some are disappointed by the mundane

but if God speaks through the light of stained glass
why not also through glass milk bottles?

what else is stewardship if not the constancy
of small actions?

what is this world but the choices we make, not waiting
but hoping for the next world?

Caroline Loves The World
“What does barbed wire feel like when you grip it, as though it were a loaf of bread, or a pair of shoes?” – from Rain by Mary Oliver

In one way, the world is a wild openness
where weather, danger and even death may spring an ambush on her
but so too may vivid joy come to her blood and breath.
On balance, it’s worth the bus ride,
or calling out the lifeboat when the current is surprising.

In another way, the world is brick-built and she can read it,
scanning plate glass for usage, the centre for footfall, testing edges
of stone steps for skateboarder damage
like some folk check houseplants for stress and pests.

In both spaces she sticks to her own two feet,
alive to risk but undeterred, her body and her wits
moving the wire away from any blocked stile, on any path
where she knows she has the right to roam.

Claire and Rowan Love The World
“And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood”
					- from When Death Comes by Mary Oliver

and a siblinghood, for those of us as apart from the binary as a tree,
served by our own folklore, and containing our own spirit -
be it anxious, or be it puckish, it is our magic

we ourselves are miles away from our siblings, and have let go our children.
in this turning season of our lives, we are choosing
new ways to know ourselves, and change our worlds

we’ve beach-combed nail-paring plastic wrack and nurdles the size of lentils,
collaged them in a making that re-makes us as artists,
invoked S.I.C.K. as a slogan-sigil that explains it all, inner and outer

and we say

identifying winter buds is just like being a wizard, so we’re filling
emptied hours with learning trees; remembering our family
called us Blossom in the pink spring of our life

remembering how we all climbed that tree in the nearby woods,
how one summer we found it felled for some planner's ring-roaded future,
our friend and all their siblings. How their deaths changed our world.