Event Details
Exhibition Opening Night for The Lifecycle of a Poem.
From Jeremy Roberts:
The exhibition is called The Lifecycle of a Poem because I wanted to show something that is usually hidden: what poems look like while they are still becoming themselves. The byline — from seed to setting loose — suggests that poems begin as small impulses and eventually move out into the world. Generally, poems are only seen once they are “clean” — typed, formatted, published, or read aloud. But that is only one stage in a poem’s life. Of course, in 2026, the most common practice now for writers is to draft on digital devices and delete the unwanted words, with no ‘creative history’ remaining — no documentation of a journey, at all.
In this exhibition you’ll see original A4 draft pages from many years of writing — real working pages. For me, they have become visual objects as much as literary ones. You’ll also see the completed poems these drafts eventually became and where they ended up.
The exhibition is free and runs from 31 July to 20 August and is endorsed by National Poetry Day.
