Encounters, Paths and Challenges: a report on the first European Biblio/Poetry Therapy Conference

In early October 2024, our Co-Chair, Mel Perry, attended the first European Biblio/Poetry Therapy Conference in Budapest. Here, Mel shares a reflection and collaborative poem reflecting on the experience.

When did you last sit in a room of almost 150 like-minded people from other countries and cultures, and experience a powerful connection between strangers as you read a piece of text together? 

Dr Victoria Field was one of the keynote speakers at the conference I attended on behalf of Lapidus at the beginning of October. She brought The Guest House by Rumi as her featured text to show us the calls to action that poetry offers in sharing hospitality, finding commonality through translation, and making connections. As we read the final line together it was as if the ensuing hush swept away fogging uncertainty and I knew how to be and what to do.

Congratulations to Dr Judit Beres and her team from the Hungarian Biblio/Poetry Therapy Association for arranging this first European conference. It was a triumph to bring together more than forty presentations and eighteen workshops in two full days. I was like a child in a sweet shop with so much choice. We had presentations which included some of the history and theory of Biblio/Poetry Therapy and training arrangements in different countries. There were more on its application in a variety of settings or with target groups including across the cancer life course, in prisons, for teachers in schools, to address burnout, to promote discourse on the climate emergency. In addition to Biblio/Poetry Therapy researchers and practitioners from European nations we were also joined by delegates from Turkey, Israel, Canada and the United States. 

I attended three workshops:

• When the universal becomes personal: Working with Trauma by Geraldine Campbell and David Madden of the Irish Poetry Therapy Network,
• Chair Yoga and reflective poetry writing with Foteini Dimitriou from Greece
• Our Grandmothers and their Blessings with Berit Kaschan from Estonia

They all included space for me to consider new different perspectives, to write expressively and reflect.

Another personal highlight for me was hearing William Sieghart. Without a mic, through the excited hubbub at the conference dinner, he commanded the echoey space with his toast to our work. He read the Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry, which he suggests as a prescription for tricky situations in an anxious world.  

In addition to the formalities of the conference, at dinner and over breakfast, I was delighted to connect with many stalwart Lapidus members too, most of whom I had only ever met online. Through these and fresh connections we hope to bring new offerings in 2025 to members and our wider community through Lapidus events, LLRC meetings, LIRIC papers and Magazine articles. 

Next year’s conference is to be organised by Finland and I encourage you to take the chance to submit a paper, attend if you can and have your enthusiasm for biblio/poetry therapy invigorated.

We created a group poem in Geraldine and Dave’s workshop and my line encapsulates for me part of the spirit of this conference:

The throb of European voices all drawn to the invisible moment of silent unity

On attending the first European Biblio/Poetry Therapy Conference Budapest 2024: a collaborative poem

We meet at the conference
held in the MagNet building
on Andrassy Avenue.

Like others on this tree-rich
artery into Budapest, this place
must have been a palace once,

then a bank, now a community centre
with a pillared, glass-roofed square
drawing our eyes upwards

from terrazzo floors, past languid palms
towards a light that speckles back
colours from the flags of each country here.

We arrive as singles, or pairs
and small groups who know each other.
We thread to register, sit in lines

in the conference hall
to listen to presentations.
We turn to our neighbours,

say Hi and Welcome and we begin.
We read The Guest House by Rumi.
We read together in silence,

we read together out loud
and we begin to revolve,
swirl into a place of sanctuary.

As I fly home I know the throb of European voices,
all drawn to the invisible moment of silent unity,
carried on the feathery wing of love.