Ink & Echo: Monthly Poetry Meetup

Welcome to Ink & Echo

Your monthly Saturday evening sanctuary for poetic exploration and expression! Half workshop and half reading, this two-hour-long event is designed to enrich your poetic craft while offering a stage for your voice to be heard.

Whether you’re a seasoned poet or picking up the pen for the first time, Ink & Echo offers a warm, inclusive space. What’s more? Each month features a unique theme, inspiring you to dive deeper into different facets of poetry.

The first hour of Ink & Echo is a workshop tailored to ignite your creative spirit. Guided by author and poet SoulReserve (author of Lakesong), you’ll dive into writing exercises, learn about different poetic forms, and explore techniques to make your words resonate.

This is a safe space to practice, make mistakes, and grow, all while enjoying the thrill of immediate and constructive feedback from your fellow poets.

The second hour opens the floor to you! Step up to the stage and share your freshly minted verses or read from your stash of treasured poems.

It’s an intimate, encouraging environment where every voice is celebrated. Each reading segment aligns with the month’s theme, offering a cohesive and engaging experience for readers and listeners alike.

Monthly Theme: May 2025

The Page Field Theory

Before the poem, there is the page... not empty, but expectant. A surface, a skin, a stage, a force field. In this workshop, the page becomes everything: breath, boundary, arena. Here, we don’t just write on it, we write with it. We let language curl into corners, scatter like ash, stack like scaffolding, vanish mid-sentence. The page invites not clarity, but presence. It lets thought sprawl and stutter. It holds silence like a spine. A poem may glow centre-stage or hang from the edge like it’s about to fall. Whether you’re composing with fracture, symmetry, illegibility, or spaciousness, this is where poetry stops behaving and starts becoming. What you place on the page and where is no longer incidental. It is the poem’s pulse, its shape, and breath. Come make marks that think, forms that feel, language that moves like architecture or disappears like smoke. The page isn’t the backdrop. It’s the field.

Besides your poetry notebooks, bring a few loose A4 sheets too. They'll give you space to explore the shape and structure the format we will be exploring calls for. (We'll supply some in case you forget).

Remember: If you have already written poems that fit the monthly theme, bring them along to share with the group.

Tickets

Tickets are pay-what-you-feel and start at $20. Book to RSVP and buy your tickets right here on Humanitix.

Location and Transport

The event will be held at Centre for Stories, Northbridge WA 6003. Centre for Stories is a wheelchair-accessible venue.

The Perth train station is a 10-minute walk from Centre for Stories. The closest Wilson parking is 2 minutes away at Northbridge Central, 8/6 Errichetti Place.

Photography Consent

This event may be photographed. By registering for a ticket, you confirm you are giving consent for any photos and recordings to be used for promotional materials and communications.

If you do not wish to be photographed, please contact Laksh at soulreserve@yahoo.com.

June Event Details

Date: 21st June 2025

Time: 5:00pm – 7:30pm

About the Facilitator

Lakshmi Kanchi (SoulReserve) is an emerging Indian-Australian poet on a mission—to make poetry accessible. Her writing anatomises the complex linkages between language, culture, and perception.

She is the author of “Lakesong”, her debut poetry collection, published by Centre for Stories. Lakshmi won the 2023 Ros Spencer Poetry Prize and 2021 Pocketry Prize for Unpublished Poets, and her works have been shortlisted for the Heroine’s Prize and Grieve Project.

Her poetry appears in ‘Australian Poetry Anthology,’ ‘Social Alternatives,’ ‘Portside Review,’ ‘Burrow Journal,’ ‘The Saltbush Review,’ and more. She was also the Inaugural Poet-in-Residence at The Wetlands Centre (2022-23) and Swan Writer-in-Residence at the Midland Courthouse (2024).