Thursday 12th July 2001 at 2.00pm
Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, London
Award-winning poet David Hart, Poet-in-Residence at South
Birmingham Mental Health Trust, will read a selection of poems
composed during his time spent in the older adult and adult
departments of the psychiatric hospital, and will run a practical
workshop entitled, ‘Where does poetry come from?’.
David took up his post, which is for one year, one day a week,
in July 2000. This innovative poetry project, has been funded with
a ‘Year of the Artist’ award from the Arts Council through West
Midlands Arts, and managed by Prof. Femi Oyebode, the medical
director of the Trust, who is also a well-known poet in his own
right.
David spent his first three months working with older adults
both in the acute wards and in continuing care. From then on he
worked in the adult department, in the hospital and elsewhere,
including a suburban Resource Centre, spending most Tuesday
afternoons in the same acute ward.
For eight weeks he ran an Occupational Therapy poetry session
for people from the acute adult wards and has recently begun
similar sessions at Reaside, the Trust’s Forensic Clinic.
David’s work has been wide-ranging, involving users, with also
some discussion and practical work with staff, including the
psychologists and psychotherapists. He has also written a song for
Denmark House, the unit for the deaf, set to music by the Trust’s
Nurse Manager, Dave Newnham, with studio backing by Nick Macartney,
who runs the Trust’s drama work. A CD has been made of the song,
entitled ‘Shine’. There is now a plan to make a CD of patients
reading their own poems.
David Hart says, "The complexity of truth and beauty will
never cease to be to the point for poets; one might also speak of
poetry as discovery, indeed as itself a research project, as a
mysterious other language asking to be heard where medical and
managerial languages tend to be louder".
David Hart is a well-known poet, who has previously run poetry
workshops for people with mental health problems, and for
psychotherapists, teachers and poets. He has wide experience of
working within the health arena, including putting poems on the
intranet during the Arts Week at Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham,
and in the commissioning of poems for waiting rooms. David has also
been Poet-in-Residence at Worcester Cathedral and Birmingham Poet
Laureate. Among his publications is a book of poems, ‘Setting the
poem to words’.
Some of David Hart's work as Poet in Residence at the South
Birmingham Mental Health Trust is
available on
this site
For further information, please contact Liz Fox or Deborah
Hart in the Communications Department.
Telephone: 020 7235 2351 Extensions. 6298 or 6127