KATHMANDU: Aksharlaya is bringing young poets and musicians together for an intimate evening of poetry, music, and conversation about the things we often leave unfinished.
Kathmandu has no shortage of places to spend a Sunday evening. There are cafes, restaurants, live music nights, open mics, and the usual rush of people trying to fit one more plan into the weekend.
On September 27, a slightly different kind of gathering will take place in Boudha.
Inside Utpala Cafe, a small audience will gather around a microphone for an evening of poetry.
Unfinished, organised by Aksharlaya with Utpala Cafe, is an intimate poetry evening bringing together young poets and artists for a night of spoken word and music. The event is being held during September’s Suicide Prevention Month, with the performances exploring themes around loneliness, emotional wellbeing, relationships, identity, healing, and the less straightforward parts of being human.
There is no panel discussion or formal talk planned around the theme. The evening is, first and foremost, about poetry.
And that is perhaps what makes the idea interesting.
Poetry has always provided a slightly different way of talking about things that can be difficult to discuss directly. A poet does not necessarily have to explain everything. A few lines can be enough to suggest an entire experience.
For an audience, the experience is different from reading a poem alone.
There is the performer in front of you, the voice, the pauses, the occasional nervousness, and the reaction of the room. A poem that might take a minute to read on a phone can take on an entirely different quality when someone stands up and performs it.
That is the format Aksharlaya is working with for Unfinished.
The evening will feature four poets: Biren Shrestha, Adina Sharma, Pyush Paudel, and Apekshya Bhattarai. They will be joined by singer Sheren Balami, bringing a musical element to the programme. Rabina Kandel will host the evening.
Together, the lineup brings different voices into the same room rather than trying to make the night revolve around one particular style of poetry.
Suicide Prevention Month is often associated with awareness campaigns and public conversations about mental health. Those conversations are important, but they can also feel formal and distant.
An evening of poetry offers a different setting.
Instead of presenting a list of facts or asking an audience to sit through a structured discussion, Unfinished creates a room where artists can approach these subjects through their own writing and performance.
The setting is deliberately intimate.
Utpala Cafe, tucked into Boudha, is hosting the evening with an expected audience of around 50 people, with a maximum capacity of 60. It is small enough for the performers and audience to share the same atmosphere rather than feeling separated by a large stage.
For the performers, that means a room where the work can be heard properly.
For the audience, it means an evening that feels closer to a poetry gathering than a conventional concert.
There will be poems. There will be music. There will be a host guiding the evening from one performance to the next.
And, hopefully, there will be the kind of conversations that tend to happen after hearing something that stays in your head for a while. Tickets are available through the Kata Jaam website and app, where interested participants can purchase tickets directly.
For Aksharlaya, the event is also part of a larger effort to create spaces for young artists to perform and for audiences to encounter poetry outside the usual literary settings.
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