Door-to-door poet Rowan McCabe brings his show to The Old Woollen in Leeds

Born in South Shields and raised in Hebburn, McCabe was initially prompted to begin his project back in 2015 in Heaton, the area of Newcastle he was living in at the time. “I had been living there for around seven years and I realised that I really didn’t know anybody on my street. That’s not unusual but I wondered why we live these separate lives and I wanted to get to know people better,” he says. “I was also questioning a few things and thinking about what it means to be a poet. I grew up in a working-class community and the work I do is very different to the work my family had done in the past. So, I was wondering about the role of a poet and what a poet is for.”

Out of these musings came the idea of offering his services as a poet to people locally. “I didn’t actually think it would work, I thought a lot of people would probably just shut the door on me,” he says. “But I almost set myself a kind of dare to have a go and see what would happen.” The project took the form of McCabe knocking on someone’s door, introducing himself and asking if people had a minute and 10 seconds to spare. If they agreed, he would recite a short poem on their doorstep, then ask them if they would like him to write a bespoke poem for them about something that was important to them. If they took him up on the offer, he would then go away, write a poem and arrange to come back to read it to them once it was finished.

“Some people were a bit confused, but most people were quite enthusiastic,” says McCabe. On the back of the success of his experiment in Heaton, he took the concept to another very different neighbourhood. “People said to me that it wouldn’t work in a working class council estate so I went to Byker Wall which is quite a tough part of Newcastle and it worked there too. I was trying to prove people wrong, I think.”

He then became a tent-to-tent poet at Glastonbury in 2016, the following year he was invited to The Hague to deliver a TEDx talk on the project and in 2018 he made his first show about it which played to sell-out audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe. He has written about everything from the problems of surfing in Scarborough, to racism and calling it out, to parenting, love, a celebration of a first date and even a poem for someone’s dog. A major objective of the whole project was making poetry as accessible to as many people as possible. “I was on a bit of a mission to prove that anyone can enjoy poetry and it was refreshing to see that actually poetry was for a lot more people than I might have expected.”

His journey around England in 2019 was an eye-opener in various ways. “I deliberately chose places that for me seemed symbolic of something so, for example, I went to Boston in Lincolnshire which was supposed to be the most divided place in England after the Brexit referendum, I met some anti-fracking protesters in Blackpool and went to Grantchester which is the location of the most Nobel prize winners. I went with all these preconceived ideas and there were some surprises. One a personal level I learnt so much, it really flagged up to me that you can’t make assumptions about places or people.”

This is what he recounts in the show, which was a huge hit in Edinburgh last summer. "It is about my final outing as a door-to-door poet,” he says. “A lot of it is funny, but some parts are a bit more shocking. It is about trying to finish the project in the build-up to the pandemic. It’s about class and community and I’m hoping it provokes a wider discussion about our relationship with the people around us.”

D oor to Door Poetry: Nationwide is at The Old Woollen, Farsley on May 25 in a double-bill with Chris Singleton’s How to Be a Better Human. Tickets oldwoollen.co.uk