‘Nothing is not giving messages,’ reads a postcard wedged between the keys of a typewriter on a cluttered bedside table. As well as a nod to Edwin Morgan, the postcard is just one item in an abundance of ephemera lining a small makeshift bedroom in the basement of the North Melbourne Town Hall. This is the setting for American-born, Edinburgh-based poet Ryan Van Winkle’s one-on-one poetry performance, Red, Like Our Room Used to Feel – though to describe it as a ‘performance’ perhaps too closely implies the theatrics of ‘performance poetry’. This is certainly not the case. Red, Like Our Room Used to Feel is an assemblage of poems written for the page, experienced intimately.

In twenty-minute sittings, Van Winkle reads a selection of poems to one visitor at a time. Before the reading, he meets you outside the room, introduces himself, and lets you know what to expect: he’s going to offer you some port, or tea if you prefer; he won’t look at you while he’s reading the poems; you can take off your shoes if you like; you may position yourself on the bed, or elsewhere in the room; he will sit on a chair.