On Sunday, I made a grown woman cry. Well, she cried, I think it was more to do with her than me, the note she wrote was an apology she would like to receive ‘I am sorry that I unethically used my memories of some of the things you have said in the past as text for my artwork. I am sorry that I took what you said on these occasions out of context and repeated them out of context during a presentation in front of you and other people, called it art and received congratulations on my genius for doing this.’ She was not directing this at me, I had never met her before, but she might as well have been. I have both been on the receiving end of this and done this to other people.

We were at the London Word Festival, at a show called This is just to say. I was performing, and she was participating along with 11 other people. I’m a poet, the show is about apology and I sit at a table with a group of people and have a conversation and tell them poems which look at saying sorry and what it means.

Among many of the conclusions drawn are that apologising is political, a British epidemic, social glue, passive aggression, love and most interestingly a massive risk. Most interesting because that is what it feels like to have made this show, to perform it, and perhaps for the audience to attend it. A risk in the sense that it is like being in a relationship with the people around the table, a relationship that is different depending on who you are, what happens and what the combination of you creates. The intimacy is some times crushing and sometimes hilarious and sometimes exhilarating. I realised early on, that if I wanted to make a show which encouraged people to connect the subject matter to themselves and potentially to share something about their own experiences, that I had to invest in the show in the same way.

So, I do. And I am not a performer, I write poems, and if there is any part that I am playing, it is myself. The show opened at Forest Fringe 2010, and Live Artist Bryony Kimmings, after seeing it, said to me ‘aren’t you scared the audience won’t care, I get that with my work’, and indeed as her website describes ‘her work promotes the airing of her own dirty laundry to oil conversations on seemingly difficult subjects.’