Sailing away with Boat Poets
To mark National Storytelling Week 2021, we caught up with Hannah Nicholls, founder of Boat Poets, to hear how the power of poetry and spoken word can engage people from all backgrounds and age groups. Hannah has turned lockdown into a creative opportunity by applying to us for funding to take Boat Poet residencies online, giving artists a chance to develop their practice during this time.
Hello Hannah. Please can you tell us about Boat Poets? What are the project’s achievements to date?
Boat Poets is a talent development project offering opportunities to emerging poets and spoken word artists through paid residencies on boats, barges and ferries on their local waterway. The artists are supported through a programme of dedicated professional development to create new work based on their experiences. The project then offers strategic performance, filming and publishing opportunities to help grow new audiences for the poets’ work.
Founded in 2017 by me in collaboration with Thames Festival Trust, in four years Boat Poets has supported 11 emerging poets, commissioned 14 new poems, created two dedicated pamphlets which are used in 10 schools and collected by the National Poetry Library, made seven poetry films (with over 30,000 views so far), delivered 10 workshops with community groups, plus four workshops for budding poets and produced five sell out events in London, Bristol and Plymouth attracting over 100,000 audience members both live and online.
Why did you apply to National Lottery Project Grants at this time? How does your project support the Boat Poet alumni?
Feeling a bit stumped as a producer during the first lockdown I emailed the Boat Poets alumni to ask how we could best support them at this time.
The main ask was for supported time to write, but also for workshops to attend and facilitate, events and filming opportunities. Essentially everyone was eager to get creating again, but needed some support to get going.
The Boat Poets online residencies project responds directly to their needs.
In my mind it was essential to use Boat Poets as an avenue to not only create paid work for our artists, but to turn lockdown into a creative opportunity whereby each poet has a chance to develop their practice and come out of this time having created something.
It also gave us an opportunity to connect with professional poets and mentors who may geographically have not been able to be involved in the past.
How has Boat Poets adapted in light of the Covid-19 pandemic?
We knew it would be impossible to access the physical boaty environments where the residencies would usually take place this year, so the project has created a shared online space for all 11 poets to come together over the month of January and get writing.
It has also supported with risk assessing visits to waterways and key sites should the poets feel like they wanted to go and explore.
The pandemic has affected each person differently and so in this version of Boat Poets we have tailored the programme much more to suit the individual needs of each artist. For example by offering one to one mentoring and editing opportunities with professional poets to focus on specific pieces of work.
By taking all of our content online we have both learned a lot about what works in the digital realm and opened the project up to new audiences from all over the UK.
What excites you most about the project and how do you think it benefits other people?
The most exciting thing about the project for me as a producer is seeing the incredible quality work produced during each residency. It really goes to show that if you pay an artist to be an artist then true magic happens! Watching the poets grow and seeing their work evolve, that’s what it’s all about for me.
The other really exciting thing that is new for this year was developing a programme of public workshops.
We ran a crowd funder to support six Boat Poets to deliver writing workshops with the aim of tackling isolation and loneliness, and were overwhelmed by the generosity of our audiences! We smashed our target and have four public and three community focused workshops in the pipeline.
The tickets have sold really fast showing that’s there’s a real need for this type of engagement which is exciting when thinking about the future of the project.
This week marks National Storytelling Week, a celebration of storytelling in all its forms. From your experience, what makes poetry a good vehicle for storytelling?
Something that’s become really clear over the past few years of Boat Poets is that there are stories around Britain’s maritime history that need to be unearthed and retold from a different perspective.
For example Saili Katebe’s residency in 2019 on SS Great Britain (in partnership with Afrika Eye) really dug down into the history surrounding Bristol’s harbourside. Which plays a huge part in the story of the transatlantic slave trade.
The reason poetry is so good as a vehicle for this kind of story telling is that it enables us to reflect on, question and talk about potentially difficult things through the lens of the poem. The poetry becomes a catalyst for conversation and a tool for engaging with people from many different backgrounds and age groups.
What is the one piece of advice you would give to those applying to National Lottery Project Grants?
Read the guidelines! I read them again every time I apply, they really are very useful. They help me to create a template so I can complete the whole application in a document before inputting into Grantium (I’m dyslexic so I really don’t get on with online forms).
All Boat Poet workshops, events and content can be accessed via the Boat Poets website www.boatpoets.com
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