Terapias de los sentidos: Emergency Poet

I am drawn instead to my own songs 

to let them sing in the fresh air love letters to myself 

wearing the blue slip with the butterflies 

I take up the pretty teapot for one the scratchy pen 

the days the life floating lonely happy 

and sad the blank sheets.

Deborah Alma

Emergency Poet… the world’s first and only mobile poetic first aid service.

A mix of the serious, the therapeutic and the theatrical, the Emergency Poet offers consultations inside her ambulance and prescribes poems as cures. In the waiting room under an attached awning Nurse Verse dispenses poemcetamols and other poetic pills and treatments from the Cold Comfort Pharmacy. There are skulls, jars of eyeballs and other body parts inside the ambulance. Dressed in white coat and stethoscope, Emergency Poet travels in her 1970’s ambulance, accompanied by Nurse Verse or The Poemedic to literary and music festivals, libraries, schools, pubs, weddings and conferences… anywhere where poetic help may be urgently required… 

Emergency Poet was conceived by poet and writer Deborah Alma as a fun way of bringing poetry to people. She is assisted in this by creative partner and poet James Sheard. 

Deborah is an experienced workshop facilitator and has delivered a range of poetry and creative writing workshops. She works using poetry to help communicate with people with dementia, both for The Courtyard Theatre in Hereford and for Ledbury Poetry Festival. She has been lead writer for Writing West Midlands Writing Squads in Shrewsbury & Ludlow, teaching creative writing to young people and teaches the Writing Poetry module at The University of Worcester. She was writer in residence for the NHS conference in 2013 on Mental Health and Wellbeing and Poet in Residence at The Hurst, for the Arvon Foundation. 

She is a highly skilled practitioner with a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham and an MA in Creative Writing (with Distinction) from Keele University.