During the last weeks of 2024, libraries from all over the UK were registering on this website, gaining immediate access to all the poems we have available. Potentially, a whole new audience, or constituency of interest, has just discovered the project. The development followed a short feature put out on the regular bulletin of an organisation called ‘Libraries Connected.’

For a while previous to that development, there had been little new to report ; and also new registrations had fallen right away.

Covid has surely played an initial part in that long silence. Before that and for some years, the project’s poem-posters could be seen and read in waiting rooms and classrooms, world-wide and pretty consistently. But then, for months, through Covid, those common public spaces were out of bounds. Human assembly had become dangerous and – for some – life-threatening.

But there’s another aspect, as well, longer lasting. A crucial element of this project’s implementation in any site is its reliance on someone who is part of that agency having enough time and mind-space to hear about the project, decide to adopt it, and organise the display of poems there. I have said that the most common venues for these poems have been healthcare waiting rooms and school class rooms. It seems clear that, since Covid, a sufficiency of creative time and mind-space has been lacking, in the fields both of education and healthcare.

There may have been other factors, but I believe that this is the main reason why, in recent years, demand for this project’s material has fallen away to almost nothing. Until recently. Suddenly, perhaps, something has changed. Conditions, agencies, elements in the landscape, do keep changing – perhaps initially out of sight and out the reckoning. And then, all at once, something breaks surface, connection is made and a new shape is added to the landscape.

Libraries provide an example of what I mean. Yes, there have been significant funding problems in recent years. But also some shape-changing in line with technical and social and educational developments. Libraries have become more like social and cultural centres, offering a whole new range of activities. Distinctions once clear are now less so. The popular word ‘hub’ begins to apply with some accuracy to buildings once associated just with books and desks and study and hush.

Just before Christmas, an organisation called ‘Libraries Connected’ advertised ‘Poems for the wall’ to its members. Since then, libraries all over the country have registered on this site. At the time of writing, I know very little more than that, except my own pleasure that perhaps we are heading back into circulation, the international and connective words of this project’s poems joining the conversation once again .

Rogan Wolf, Project Director