How about “a poem with your chips”?

Well not quite, but when the Poetry Takeaway hit the streets of Wrexham the service proved just as quick as the fast food giant’s store across Regent Street.

Cheeseburgers were not on the menu, but there were plenty of nuggets of personal reflection in poems dished out by a travelling panel of poets, including Wrexham’s Natasha Borton.

They manned a mobile poetry emporium and penned personalised poems for town centre shoppers to takeaway free of charge in the time it took to order a Big Mac and fries.

The unusual venture was part of the ‘Voices Nationwide’ project organised by London-based creative arts hub Roundhouse and the Nationwide Building Society, aimed at delivering spoken word events across the country to encourage local people to share stories and opinions through verse.

As well as the Poetry Takeaway, Wrexham’s UnDegUn arts centre hosted a series of workshops run for women by Wrexham poet Sophie McKeand and Erin Bolens from the Roundhouse.

Many of those taking part had never penned a piece of prose before in anger, but felt confident enough to recite their poems at a performance at UnDegUn later that evening.

They were embracing the philosophy poems and verse should be for everyone – not just left in dusty school textbooks to be poured over by academics – as they are an excellent method of communicating the real dramas of people’s lives.

The ‘Voices Nationwide’ has reflected a range of poetic views and styles during a year-long campaign. One of those featuring in it has been Jeremiah Brown, whose TV advert focused on loneliness in the digital age.

Jeremiah – who goes under the name Sugar J Poet – was in Wrexham to help out and he says: “It has been fun – we’ve heard some great stories from the people who have popped in.

“It’s a conversation really. I ask them if they want a poem for themselves or someone else.

“We have a chat and I take some notes. It’s stories and then I interpret them by using different imagery.

“It’s kind of about trust too and what they want to do with it [the information].”

Jeremiah, from London, says a new generation of younger artists are reviving the poetry scene in the UK, including some of his favourite contemporary poets Caleb Femi, Jacob Sam-La Rose and Amina Jama.

“The interest in poetry is growing and people are seeing it more than just as an art form that isn’t dead, but a vibrant thing,” he added.

“It was seen as the ‘words of dead white men’, but that is different now which is cool.”

In Wrexham some of those transforming stories into verse have received help at a refuge run by Wrexham Women’s Aid.

Sophie, who is the Young People’s Laureate for Wales, admitted she was impressed with the standard of their work and the confidence they showed getting on stage to perform.

“We wanted to work with people who wouldn’t have considered putting themselves forward for something. We just wanted to them to feel they could get involved with the project – and they wrote some amazing work,” she said.

“It was about exploring language and memory and finding your way forward to be confident to shape that on the page and perform for a small group of people later.

“We’d do the same with men too. But for this was for women.

“I am a big supporter or Wrexham’s Women Aid and I loved the idea of this being a project for the women who have been through the refuge and are out the other side enjoying their lives. It was a chance for them to come back together and have a nice time.”

Erin explained: “The aim was to work with people who didn’t have a massive experience of creative writing. For some it was completely new.

“We gave them little prompts to write about their own lives, so we wrote things about Wrexham and things about their own families and homes.

“We gave them some strange prompts too, so like we did a lot of sensory stuff – smelling things and seeing where that took us and what it made us think about.

“It was not really about the result – there were no rules and we were not marking anyone.”

Sophie says poetry is thriving in Wrexham with spoken word evenings at the ‘Voice Box’ at UnDegUn proving popular, plus some big name, sell-out shows.

“We had Neil Hilborn over from America and is was a 150-seater sell-out for a poetry gig here in Wrexham on Monday night,” she says. “Poetry is being more and more stitched into Wrexham’s culture – it is not just for the arty people.

“All the poetry projects I have seen in Wrexham have been inclusive and engaged with the wider community, which is great to see. We’ve got ‘Dydd Llun Pawb’ (‘Everybody’s Monday’) on March 1 next year when we celebrate the opening of the new Oriel. I’ve been commissioned to write a poem for it called We are Wrexham for that.”

Jack Prideaux, producer at the Roundhouse, says: “Poetry is occupying a really important place in society, acting as a tool for people to share personal stories and what matters to them.”