Distraction Therapy is broadcast on Soar Sound on Wednesdays, 9pm to 11pm.
This episode of Distraction Therapy includes a short edited feature recorded at a Word open-mic event at Attenborough Arts on Thursday 28th May 2026. It is not presented as a full recording of the evening, and it is not intended to document every performance. Instead, it offers a sequence of voices, fragments and atmospheres from a room in which poetry was being shared, tested, spoken, sung, laughed through, and listened to.
Open-mic events have their own quality of attention. They are not quite performances in the formal sense, and they are not simply casual gatherings. They sit somewhere between the two. There is a stage, a microphone, a host, a running order and an audience, but there is also uncertainty. People come forward with paper, phones, notebooks, memory, nerves and the need to say something aloud. Some arrive with work that has clearly been shaped and rehearsed. Others bring material that still carries the energy of having only recently been written. The room has to make space for both.
That is what makes an evening like this so valuable. It is a place where culture is not only presented, but practised. The point is not simply to judge whether a piece is finished, polished or accomplished. The point is to listen to the process of a voice becoming public. A poem may arrive as testimony, humour, song, memory, prayer, observation, fantasy, or a small act of defiance against silence. Each contribution alters the room for a few minutes, then gives way to the next.
For Distraction Therapy, this kind of event has a particular resonance. The programme is concerned with the states of mind that art, music, literature and creative expression can open up. Not distraction as evasion, but distraction as a subtle change in perception. A movement away from the narrow, task-focused mind and towards a more reflective, receptive and imaginative mode of being.
A live poetry room can do this very directly. It asks us to stop scanning for information and instead listen to texture: breath, hesitation, rhythm, laughter, stillness, uncertainty and confidence. It asks us to listen before we categorise. It asks us to accept that not every piece will explain itself immediately, and that this may be part of the value of the experience.
The Word event had the feeling of a loosely curated space. That looseness mattered. It did not mean that the evening lacked care or structure. Rather, it meant that the structure was light enough to allow different kinds of voice to emerge. There was room for vulnerability, spiritual reflection, comic performance, family memory, disability access, mythic imagery, daydreaming and the personal work of making sense of experience.
One of the strongest threads running through the recording is the idea of return. Return to poetry. Return to confidence. Return to the self. Return to the possibility of speaking after a long silence. Cat Hurst’s piece, reflecting on poetry coming back into the room after decades away from it, gives that feeling a clear shape. Poetry is remembered first as something that once felt like a test, something to be analysed until it stopped breathing. Then it returns differently: less as an examination, more as an invitation.
That shift is central to the feeling of the episode. What happens when we no longer need to know exactly what a poem means before it can matter to us? What happens when we stop treating creative expression as something to be solved, and begin to receive it as something that opens a temporary atmosphere?
Other voices in the feature move through emotional repair, personal testimony, faith, everyday practicalities and humour. Kamisha Hawkins brings a reflective and musical quality, moving through shame, fear, grief and self-acceptance towards a form of tenderness. Babin, or Bavin, Gohel’s “Dear Rome” turns the desire to travel into a set of practical questions about access, lifts, toilets and the body. Jessica’s poems gather fragments of colour, family, memory and place into a personal map of where someone comes from.
Pearl’s contribution is more intimate, shaped around belonging, womanhood, family, faith and the search for a place to stand. Imane’s poem moves across religious and spiritual spaces, less as doctrine than as felt experience. Lorna Al-Wain’s performance opens into a reflection on daydreaming, treating the drifting imagination not as a failure of attention, but as a charged and potentially creative state. Thin Man brings another register again: comic exaggeration, theatrical absurdity and the necessary release of laughter.
This movement between tones is important. A strong open-mic night does not flatten everything into one mood. It allows contrast. It allows the serious and the ridiculous to coexist. It lets a room move from tenderness to laughter, from uncertainty to rhythm, from speech to song, from personal difficulty to playful invention. In doing so, it reminds us that a cultural event is not only made by the people on stage. It is also made by the listeners, by the atmosphere, and by the shared willingness to stay with each voice for a while.
There is also something quietly civic about this. Not in the formal language of policy or institutions, but in the everyday sense of people gathering in a room and making time for one another. The open-mic format depends on trust. It depends on people accepting that they may not know what is coming next. It depends on generosity, patience and the belief that a voice should be given room before it is judged.
That is why this feature belongs inside Distraction Therapy. It is not only about poetry. It is about a state of collective attention. It is about what happens when people are given a modest platform and enough confidence to use it. It is about the cultural life that forms in small rooms, through informal structures, through people who are willing to listen.
What stays with me from the recording is not a single performance, but the feeling of the room itself. The sound of people stepping forward. The slight shift before someone begins. The way a poem can change the temperature of a space. The way humour can reset the air. The way an audience can hold someone’s uncertainty without rushing to tidy it up.
This episode is offered in that spirit: as an edited trace of an evening, and as an invitation to listen to the room as much as to the words.
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