Back in March, when lockdown seemed inevitable, but hadn’t officially begun, I got thinking about poetry. All of my favourite local nights had wisely been cancelled, and the next event I was booked to perform at was clearly not going to happen. I knew I was certainly not the only one being affected. I don’t rely on poetry sets as a source of income, but others do, and even in those early days, Covid was clearly already massively impacting artists.

I had recently quit my non-poetry job, and was facing three months in Birmingham before my lease would end and I’d move home to Edinburgh for the summer. Three months is not really enough time to find, start, and leave a new job, but it’s a lot of time to spend unemployed and alone amid a nationwide quarantine. I needed a project, poets needed events. I took a long shower where I mulled over different puns (poetry nights are legally required to have punny names) and Risk aVerse was born.