You would not usually expect an afternoon event at a festival to be a packed affair.  But it’s also sensible to assume that at Ireland’s first spoken word festival, Lingo, a lot of expectations would be subverted.

Organised into various showcases corresponding to a range of Dublin performance nights, Lingo offered a creative and varied three-day line-up. The A-Musings showcase took place at 1pm, upstairs in the Workman’s Club. For the uninitiated, A-Musings is a monthly performance night that takes place in Accents Coffee and Tea Lounge, offering comedy, live music, spoken word, and generally a lot of puns, and is presided over by comedian and poet David Hynes.

The showcase opened with the near-indescribable BeRn. Both a songwriter and a spoken word artist by trade, her musical background shone through in the close rhythms of her tense, intricate poetry. A mix of storytelling, political commentary, and Patti Smith-esque punk spirit, her poems contained everything from lighthearted fables of the technological age to mystical graveyard scenes. I was particularly fond of the wild We’re Through, a staccato rant of John Cooper Clarke proportions.

The next set, a series of spiraling, hip-hop influenced meditations from Cathal Holden,  touched on myth, metaphysics, and tongue-in-cheek witticisms. These poems combined humour and absurdity with profound insight, provoking questions on the nature of identity and our tendency to strive after elusive goals. The tale of a narrator on an unexplained quest to find ‘The Man’ was particularly memorable for its fanciful, whirlwind buildup and clever resolution.

Máighréad Medbh gave a very original set, showing the variety that the spoken word form encompasses. Her poetry showed so much precision, at once vivid and delicate in its imagery, that it gave listeners the impression that her works would be just as interesting to read as to hear. The pieces retained their subtlety while remaining dark and atmospheric, full of a sensuous and sometimes unsettling energy.

Incisive hilarity followed, courtesy of Cormac Lally. His poem about keeping pet fowl contained the pun “hens with benefits”; his set was complete with a meditation on the ninja powers acquired by parents in the quest not to wake their sleeping babies. Lally’s ability to write about pretty much anything showed an innocent appreciation of the world juxtaposed with a healthy amount of cynicism.

The showcase finished with an inimitable set by Clara Rose Thornton. Structured around geographical location, her poems came off as spontaneous, vibrant vignettes. Her delivery was unique, characterised by repeated phrases which lent the poems the feeling of hypnotic incantations. Whether describing a seedy New York or a ghostly, magical Paris, her poems had an enchanting immediacy about them that ensured we left the show in a wide-eyed, preoccupied sort of mood.

As MC of the showcase, Hynes kept the good spirits flowing with humorous interjections and his own wordplay-heavy poetry. In this manner, the acts were perfectly calibrated, different enough in theme and style that the extremely varied spectrum encompassed by the spoken word scene was definitely apparent.