POETRY might not be everybody’s thing, but it was for the 100 or so audience members who attended Nigerian poet Ben Okri’s talk yesterday evening.

On the ninth day of Swindon’s Festival of Literature, the OBE award winner awed, soothed and inspired his audience through a reading of different poems from his latest collection, Wild.

Okri – often described as one of Africa’s greatest writers – is renowned for weaving dreams into his novels, poems and short stories, and with the help of his soft and melodic reading he cast the same spell over his listeners. Nevertheless Okri admitted he doesn’t always set out to write a particular poem. “If you know what you’re doing it wouldn’t be so interesting,” he said.

“I don’t think poetry comes from the intelligent part of you. I think it comes from the part of you you only touch occasionally. It’s bigger than you, it’s deeper than you, wiser than you. If you try to be more intelligent than the poetry, you might win, but the poetry will die.”

He doesn’t even agree that his work is particularly spiritual. “I think all really great poetry is spiritual because that’s the part of you that’s speaking to it,” he said.

“Sometimes my poetry is spiritual because it’s spirit talking to spirit, and sometimes it’s not. In some ways it is always spiritual because I believe poetry is infused with it.”

Beginning the evening by reading from his prose poem, Poetry and Life, he introduced his particular mundane-yet-metaphysical style.

“Poetry is closer to us than politics,” runs one particular line, “and is as intrinsic to us as walking or eating”.

Slowly, the talk evolved into a conversation between Ben Okri, the audience and festival director Matt Holland, and listeners freely whooped and chuckled as the night progressed.

One favourite poem, Piano, was read twice, once by Okri and again by popular demand by Holland.

Perhaps one of his most interesting readings was from Tales of Freedom, a work in which he merges poetry and prose into a new form he calls Stoku – because it’s where story and Haiku meet. Like his talk, Wild – the first poetry collection Okri has released in a decade – looks set to be as quietly quirky, truthful and moving as his talk.