When poetry is locked out

Abstract

Community Arts Partnership (CAP) is an organization whose aim is to take “the lead in the promotion, development and delivery of community arts practice in Northern Ireland” (CAP 2015b). The organization was set up in 2011 after the merging of New Belfast Community Arts Initiative with Community Arts Forum. Its motto is Connecting Creativity with Community, and it seeks to achieve this in two ways: “firstly, supporting access and participation by seeking to affect policy through advocacy and leadership and secondly, promoting authorship and ownership through the active engagement in projects and programmes” (CAO 2015b). With respect to its second function, CAP runs a number of educational projects based on different arts forms, including the visual arts, the performing and carnival arts, media and digital arts, and eco-aware fashion. Each project consists of a programme of workshops run by professional artists who work with community groups and schools (CAP 2015a). These workshops provide participants from different sections of society with a central role and seek to engage those who might feel marginalized (CAP 2015a). In the process, “Participants are encouraged to gain a variety of skills, while communities are supported to take new directions, and build dialogue and understanding within and across communities” (CAP 2015a). CAP’s biggest project is Literature and Verbal Arts (LaVA), one of whose strands is known as Poetry in Motion for Community. This article is based on excerpts from an interview with the project co-ordinator, the spoken word poet Chelley McLear. The article seeks to explore her views in relation to contribution that poetry can make to different communities, focusing in particular on that constituted by offenders.