We are full of worlds that can't be contained by a pill
MAD Poetry is an initiative that originated in the Illawarra, evolving in 2019 into workshop pilots in Port Kembla and Wollongong supported by the Mental Health Commission of NSW. 2020 and 2021 saw MAD Poetry find a home at Red Room Poetry coordinated by David Stavanger, including a workshop program and commissions of established and emerging lived experience poets.
The key focus of the project is on creating a safe writing space for emerging voices with a lived/living experience of mental health issues to express how they see the world, where these poets can define themselves through their creativity not their diagnosis, and explore by pen and page their experience of illness, institutions, recovery, self-care, and beyond.
MAD Poetry 2025 will see the return of our national free online workshop series (in partnership with Wellways) and the online publication of five new poetry commissions across October as part of Mental Health Month.
MAD Poetry Workshops
A national online MAD Poetry Zoom workshop series Tuesdays 7, 14, 21, 28 Oct 630-8pm with 4 x lived experience facilitators: Lucy Norton, Kendrea Rhodes, Tim Loveday, Lamisse Hamouda.
Workshop Poets
-
Hades
By Rebecca MoranWhen the river burst its banks
I was busy at work.
I had meetings. Plans. I wasn’t ready.
-
Sansomnia
By Kendrea RhodesNocturnal rhythms tick and hum through the house,
you slip across the floorboards
leaving entrails in your wake
for others to retrace come dawn. -
green thumbs
By Lucy Nortonwhen i was young, i wished to
create somewhere so beautiful
where pain and terror
couldn’t find me. -
I want no truck with death
By Tim LovedayAfter Pablo Neruda’s ‘Keeping Quiet’
They used to be morning poems > as in to return to the house with all the pungent fate & fear of youth only to discover that the cellar door is caved in > not with axe but lyric > in the not quite driveway my father’s hand grips the back of my neck & I confuse the axe > what then are we to ma… -
Suicide Pyjamas
By Aishah AliThe loudest harpoon in the phantom orchestra of my thoughts that night was the horrifying realisation that I opted
for the least flattering (ugliest) pyjamas when the paramedics rolled in like a typhoon into my childhood bedroom (after the first time) I tried do
The aim of this project is to share lived experiences of mental health via poetry. Therefore, some of the workshop content may potentially trigger some readers. If you require mental health support or assistance, you can call the Wellways Helpline plus a list of free confidential 24/7 support lines can be found here. You are not alone in your journey.
MAD Poetry artwork by Rachel Wenona Guy.
