Sheema Huq had been planning to set the world record for the highest number of poetry recitals in a day. Then she did the research. A five-hour performance carried a real risk of vocal damage. Guinness required a dedicated verification team. And the fee, to make it official, was £12,000.
“I then changed my application,” she says, with some understatement.
On Saturday 21 March, Sheema and four other Wandsworth poets will recite their own work continuously for five hours at Putney Library‘s Meeting Hall, raising money for the Wandsworth Carers’ Centre. Tickets are free. The trophies are bamboo. The council’s arts team, consulted along the way, had one suggestion: make it “an enjoyable, relaxed experience.”
The five poets span generations and postcodes. Siddiq Islam is a Southfields musician-poet who has won two Poetry Society Young Poets Network Writing Challenges, runs his own club at Southfields Library, and released a debut EP, Tiling Bathrooms, in 2025. He describes his writing process as happily chaotic: “I have a concept in my head, and then I’ll play with it, and something will materialise.” One of his poems for the event is called a dog named joy. Its opening line is: “all my happy poems are gloomy.”
Preparing for five continuous hours has made Sheema think hard about the physical side of language. “I’ve always been fascinated by the sound of language,” she says. “I’ve had to think of intonations, the pauses, the pace, the tone, the emphasis on vowels and consonants.”
Sarah Osman, a Tooting Bec poet and aspiring novelist, found her way into the group through Tara Theatre’s community play Echoes of Earsfield last December. Lizzie Rose, whose published collection is Tomorrow We Fight Yesterday’s Men, is travelling up from Tunbridge Wells for the day. She’s due to perform at the Womad festival this year. Marie Murray, shaped by Dylan, Cohen and Shakespeare, is a long retired social worker approaching 80 but still goes to the gym.
Sheema organised the whole thing, approaching each poet individually. She wanted to raise money for the Wandsworth Carers’ Centre, having been a carer herself,. “I felt compelled to organise something to give back to the community,” she says. Her own anthology, Stubborn as a Turmeric Stain, was published in 2024. Her poem for the day is She Wears Beads.
Here are both poems.
Performed live
She Wears Beads
She wears flowerbeds and fruit trees, with flavoured, varnished melodies, hilltops and valleys with purple skies and great seas. She wears dreamlike curiosities of illustrious, patterned mysteries. She wears quiet sounds and lost leaves, beating hearts and urban scenes. She wears beads.
ListenPerformed live
a dog named joy
i found a dog, a dog named joy, and she was the ugliest misrablest creature i’d ever seen her smiles fell limp like wonky rusty seesaws i told her, ‘all my happy poems are gloomy’ i do not think she quite knew what i mean: nought but a wonky smile did seep back to me if dogs could muster poems, joy’s would be the saddest little heart-wrenchers ever been and i hope that that accomplishment would please her.
ListenEach poet gets twelve minutes per hour, rotating through the five hours. People are welcome to come and go as they please.
The Gasping Poets of Wandsworth perform at Putney Library‘s Meeting Hall on Saturday 21 March. Tickets are available via Eventbrite in one-hour slots. Donations to the Wandsworth Carers’ Centre can be made via Give As You Live.
