Poet Rowan McCabe didn't know his neighbours. So he went door to door writing poems for them

Rowan McCabe was raised to appreciate art. His mum was a teacher who surrounded him with books, and his stepdad was a punk with a penchant for Swan Lake who encouraged him to broaden his cultural horizons. But – like many people – poetry was not a big part of his childhood, or even his early adulthood as an English student. He didn’t encounter it often, and when he did, it was about “country manors, deathly shrouds, serious lords and fluffy clouds” – not the kind of subject matter that resonated with a boy from “a rough estate”. 

He explains all this in the introductory poem he delivers on the doorsteps of strangers around the UK. In early 2019, he quit his job facilitating an after-school club to become the world’s first door-to-door poet, sparked by two realisations.

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

“The first thing was that I realised I didn’t know any of my neighbours,” he says. “I just found it very strange that there was probably about 400 people all living on my street, and I’d never spoke to any of them before, and I started thinking about the fact that that’s not really very unusual. 

“Then the second thing was that I’m the first person in the McCabe family to work in the arts. There’s not really a precedent for that in my family. I was just mulling that over and thinking that [being a poet will] never really be a proper job. It’s not like you’d ever have to do it door to door, like a door-to-door salesman. And somewhere in the back of my head, I just started thinking, well, what if you did – what if you had to go door to door?”

He began in his home town. He would knock on a door, wait 45 seconds and if they answered, recite his introductory poem, explaining he would talk to them about whatever they were interested in, then go away and write a poem about it free of charge, arranging a time to come back and deliver it.

The project, backed by the Arts Council, took him to Stockton-on-Tees – the site of controversial reality show Benefits Street – and Jaywick – a town so deprived that a US Republican campaign used it as a warning of what life under Democrat leadership might hold. But he also ventured to Grantchester, home of the world’s highest concentration of Nobel Prize winners; the island of Lundy, where he became trapped for days by extreme weather; and Limerick, which failed to live up to the enthusiasm for poetry that its name promised.

Read more:

• Poetry is perfect for my ADHD mind – one that is after endless dopamine hits
• How the Shipping Forecast inspired poetry and wonder for over 100 years
• Poet laureate Simon Armitage on his years as a probation officer – and the redemptive power of poetry

Along the way, he encountered people whose experiences are rarely the subject of verse – a woman in Boston whose daughter was murdered; palliative care patients in their final days in Leeds; residents of a youth hostel in Birmingham; Syrian refugees in Folkstone. “That’s what happens when you ask people what’s important to them and you don’t have any further parameters,” McCabe says. “Some of [the poems] were so silly and daft and hilarious, and some suggestions were really, really moving and quite harrowing.”

His work also expanded his horizons in other ways. “Sometimes, you might get chatting to someone who you think you’ve got no common ground with, and then you realise you do,” he says. “But on the flip side, sometimes I got chatting to people who raised subjects that were either something I knew absolutely nothing about, or an opinion that I disagreed with. You have to sit with that and you have to explore it and you have to write a poem about it, and the longer you spend doing that, the more it broadens your perspective.”

Despite early warnings from strangers that the project would not work, McCabe found interest almost everywhere he went. “I think we’re all a bit lonely, but I wouldn’t want to give the impression that the only people I spoke to were just people who were so isolated that they would have spoken to anyone – even a poet! They seemed like fairly ordinary people in that sense,” he says.

“But that’s not to say that they weren’t lonely. I think that in the days we live in, there are not many opportunities to talk to someone and for them to just listen without trying to get something out of it, and I realised that as time went on, that was really my job. It was just to sit in, to record and not to interfere or to judge or to get in the way or to try to steer things in one direction.

“That’s why it felt so important that it was not something I was asking for money for. It was a gift. It wasn’t a transaction. It was just a case of me being there and just listening. I do think people were grateful for that, and I got something out of that as well.”

The Door-to-Door Poet by Rowan McCabe is out on 18 September (Eye Books, £14.99).

You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

Reader-funded since 1991 – Big Issue brings you trustworthy journalism that drives real change.

Every day, our journalists dig deeper, speaking up for those society overlooks.

Could you help us keep doing this vital work? Support our journalism from £5 a month.