I luurve writing poetry,” drawls Jerry Hall lusciously. “It just comes to me and I write it down.” Hall, who composes heartfelt ditties on relationships, is just one high-profile example of a mass rush to express ourselves in verse. Michelle Obama hosted a poetry jam at the White House earlier this month, Kate Nash is a fan, and all over the country poetry slams — where street poets rap out their musings — have become the hot ticket. We even have an exciting new female poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Poetry, it seems, has been knocked off its elevated literary perch and become yet another new rock’n’roll.

So what has unlocked our inner muse, and why are women in particular getting so turned on by the power of verse? Well, first, those accessible, conversational songs of Lily Allen, the Streets’ Mike Skinner and Kate Nash got us thinking — to the tune of “doesn’t sound so hard ...” They, in turn, enabled the breakthrough of a new generation of role models — who took poetry off the page and into live poetry slams and jams.

Brigitte Aphrodite, 25, who describes her work as musical comedy poetry, took her verse out of her bedroom and into open-mic nights 18 months ago. Performing makes her feel “fabulous”. It’s about sharing those raw emotions: “If you write something when you’re massively lonely, and then people relate to it, it goes full circle. It’s like therapy.”

Laura Dockrill, 23, has been a poetic support act at a host of music gigs (for, among others, Martha Wainwright, Peggy Sue and Kate Nash) and is performing at Camp Bestival and Latitude festival. It wasn’t always so: four years ago, her only audience was her mother. Then, inspired by the “boy-band poets” Aisle 16, she realised she too could perform. Knowing what it was like to “have nowhere to go”, Dockrill put an e-mail address on her MySpace page a couple of months ago to which all those secret poets could send their work — she has received more than150 offerings. “People want to get creative themselves,” she says, “though there’s nothing too political. They’re mostly about themselves.”

The medium seems to give women a freedom to express themselves in a way they can’t do anywhere else. As the writer and academic Sarah Churchwell puts it: “Poetry can be about expressing one single emotion — rage, love ... You don’t need a long narrative, with a beginning, middle and end, or an attention span, only your feeling at that moment.” And unlike prose — which Churchwell points out is necessarily “prosaic” — poetry suggests your feeling is of “tremendous importance”.

It’s a sign of the unsettled times: Penelope Gabriel, a 22-year-old actress who has written loads of poems about “the state of the world”, reckons that everyone has so much to say. “I was like a sponge,” she says, “soaking up all these things. Poetry was a way to churn it all out. Reading it back helps me understand what’s in my head.” What does verse do that a diary, or a blog, doesn’t? “This is much more subconscious,” explains Gabriel. “I lose myself in the words. You’re much more conscious of yourself with a diary. Here, it’s just a stream of words.”

She makes it sound so easy — that’s because this new wave is much freer. “It’s not about being perfect,” says Gabriel. “Nobody expects you to have old-school style and structure.” She insists that anyone can have a go: “Everyone’s doing it. It’s the cool thing to do.” Why? Because, she argues, it’s got depth: “Rather than take loads of drugs and listen to some band, you can grasp hold of something with meaning.”

“Meaning” — the zeit-word for 2009. MC Angel, 27, is a performance poet and poetry teacher. She says: “There’s a new tidal wave of consciousness. Everyone wants to express themselves.” And so they are, publishing on Facebook, populating the burgeoning number of open-mic nights, and trying their luck further afield. The inundated arts curator at Latitude, Tania Harrison, equates them to wannabe bands: “A couple of hundred secret poets applied to perform this year. There’s more interest for the poetry tent than any other arena,” she says. “We see a lot of individualistic, intimate musings.”

Hang on, what about the cringe factor? There’s nothing that says “self-absorbed teenager” more than a badly composed poem born of a broken heart. “This generation is not a modest one,” says Todd Swift, a Canadian poet and editor of the poetry page in Selfridges’ recent centenary magazine. “They grew up with reality TV, and now they’re thinking, ‘Why should [reality stars] get all the attention?’ They’re all wondering, ‘Maybe it’s me next.’ ” Could it be you?

Additional research by Mary Meyer

FOR ELIZABETH HURLEY

By India Knight

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