Meet Jenny Mitchell... Cork’s new community poet

Cork is a city known for its vibrant arts scene, with the coming summer months packed with festivals and events celebrating culture, music, and the written word.

A welcome addition to this rich cultural landscape is the new Poet-in-the-Community residency, established by Cork City Council Libraries with support from Creative Ireland.

Jenny Mitchell will serve in this role between June and October this year, working with poets from diverse communities across the city to encourage and develop their creative work.

Brixton-based Jenny had always dreamed of visiting Cork after hearing about it from a friend many years ago, but her love affair with the city began in earnest when she won the Gregory O’Donoghue Prize - an international poetry competition sponsored by the Munster Literature Centre - in 2022 and travelled Leeside the following year to attend the International Poetry Festival.

“I was incredibly shocked and incredibly delighted”, says Jenny of her win. “That was my first visit to Cork and I absolutely loved it... People are so welcoming and so friendly, and I was really lucky to be invited back to perform the next year as well.”

Jenny began working with Patricia Looney, Senior Executive Librarian at Cork City Libraries, to facilitate poetry workshops.

It was through this work - and Jenny’s prior experiences as both the Poet-in-Residence at Sussex University and the British Library Poet-in-the-Community - that the Cork residency was born.

“Cork City Libraries are very excited about this new residency, which will reach out to a variety of communities for creative engagement through poetry and the spoken word”, says Patricia Looney, who has spearheaded the project.

“We are delighted to welcome Jenny Mitchell as the first Poet-in-the-Community for the service.”

Patricia also expresses “huge thanks to Creative Ireland for making this possible”.

The six-month residency is “a good amount of time for me to really get to know the community," considers Jenny.

“It’s not top-down. It’s very much me learning from the community in Cork and seeing how that informs my work, and what I can also bring to the communities that I meet. It’s a really exciting piece of work.”

A major part of Jenny’s role will be working with communities across Cork city that have been traditionally considered harder to reach.

She and the library are currently undertaking a mapping exercise to reach out to such groups and organise workshops with them.

They will consider ideas around community and what it means for us as individuals. This will be a collaborative venture.

“We’re really trying to work with groups and bring something to them that they actually need,” Jenny explains. 

“We don’t want to just go in and say, ‘OK, this is the work we want to do’. We want to know what they want from us.”

The aim is to publish an anthology of poetry created by these groups towards the end of the residency period.

Cork City Libraries will also host a range of workshops for the general public, which will include open-mic sessions for anyone who wishes to share their poetry with an audience.

The first public event will be the official launch of the residency on Thursday, June 26 at Cork City Library on Grand Parade, between 6pm and 7pm.

Jenny and a number of guest poets will read from their work, and the open mic will be on offer for attendees.

The hope is to engage as many members of the public as they can.

As Jenny notes: “There’s no point in having the residency if people don’t know about it. We really want to spread the word as far as we can.”

Another key part of the Poet-in-the-Community role will be mentoring a local poet, Kemi George-Simpson.

Kemi will shadow Jenny during the workshops, building on her existing experience of facilitating community engagement through poetry.

She will also have the opportunity to develop her own work through the mentorship programme.

Jenny is excited to see what the two poets can learn from each other:

“Kemi is already incredibly experienced, so it’s not a pupil-teacher relationship. It’s much more equal than that.

“It’s about sharing, and seeing what my work can add to hers, and vice versa."

For her part, Kemi says she is delighted to be working with Jenny, adding: “I look forward to learning from her depth of understanding and breadth of experience.”

Kemi believes that the residency will “draw hidden talents out, develop skills for expressing experiences, and breathe further creativity into Cork”.

In a world full of division and strife, the arts can bring people together.

Reflecting on the importance of poetry in the community, Jenny says: “One of the things that poetry allows us to do is speak from the heart. It can allow us to go really deep and to say how we feel in the moment.

“And I think that’s a great way for us as individuals and diverse communities to have a conversation with each other.

“Poetry can allow us to speak to each other on a human universal level.”

Jenny looks forward to getting to work in the city that is so close to her heart.

Sharing her hopes for the residency, she concludes: “I hope it will enhance the poetry landscape that already exists. I just want to bring more poetry to Cork”.

The Cork City Council Libraries Poet-in-the-Community residency launch event will take place on Thursday, June 26, 6-7pm at City Library, Grand Parade.

For more information on upcoming Poet-in-the-Community events, visit https://www.corkcitylibraries.ie/en/events/