Luke Wright's (FREE!) Poetry Party

How about this for value for money: on 11 and 12 of August, from midday to midnight each day, 20 of Britain's top performance poets, from John Hegley to Lemn Sissay, will perform at Dr Robert's Magic Bus in The Meadows, as a curtain raiser to the Edinburgh Festival. And it's completely free. This seems like an absolutely brilliant idea: how do you bring poetry to a wider audience? Make it free and interesting, that's how. Luke Wright's Poetry Party looks like a winner – Wright followed up his acclaimed Edinburgh shows last year with a sold out tour, so he knows something about putting on a gig.

Sadly, many people won't have been to see a poetry gig before. Clearly this is the place to start. To give some sense of what the event is like, I grabbed hold of as many of the performers as I could for their opinions. Lemn Sissay is sombre: "I have long since stopped hoping for anything specific from the audience" he says, adding "They are at a poetry gig. It's where you go when all hope is lost and there is nothing to do but have a good time and be as deep as shallow as dark and as light as the mood takes you." I think he's joking there. Polarbear (yes, that's the name of a poet) is lighter: "I'm looking forward to being in a place that's buzzing from all the creative stuff that's going on," and also "to the jokes to be had at all the weird theatre types milling around talking funny." He'll probably get the chance.

Jenny Lindsay, of Edinburgh based Big Word Poetry, and Tim Turnbull, poet in residence at HMP Edinburgh, are cooler about the event. Turnbull says his reaction to playing at the party was "Oh good, I won't need keys" and Lindsay says that "I will get paid, which is a rare and wholesome experience for my bulimic bank account." But she adds that "there's not a single poet on there that I don't want to see." Murray Lachlan Young says that "Last time I was here I completely lost the plot. I'm hoping to do the same again" whilst Tim Clare has higher hopes, saying "For a significant proportion of the audience, the shock at seeing performance poetry that isn't shit will be like a mini religious experience. They'll fall to their knees weeping and question every certainty upon which they have formerly relied". It could happen.

Joe Dunthorne is looking forward to "A chance to perform with and hang out with the best poets in Britain," which will happen. Tim Wells looks for "hopefully something to offend everyone" and Francesca Beard says that coming to Edinburgh makes her feel "mainly good, with an undercurrent of woohoo." But who are these people, and are they any good? Well, you'd be best going along to judge for yourself – it is free. But what if you're not that jazzed about poetry? Well, I think Jenny Lindsay says it best: "Saying you don't like 'poetry' is like saying you don't like 'music' - all the acts are very different, so if there's not one ye can find that rocks yer boat then you need a quiet word with yerself..." Amen.