Amid soft romantic florals and dressed-up wedding guests, poet Maya Stein sets up her preferred typewriter, a vintage turquoise Remington Ten Forty, and prepares to type original sonnets and soliloquies for anyone who approaches her table. It’s a way to capture the romance of the day, and it’s a little souvenir for attendees to fondly recall the event. Stein has been writing live poetry at events for a decade now, and she says the demand for wedding poetry is only growing. 

Contemporary couples who are seeking to make their cocktail hours more interactive are reviving the Ancient Greek and Roman tradition of incorporating poetry into their big day, but in an intimate and customized way. Predating the written word, poetry has long been a means of orally reciting history, lineage, feelings of love, and more. Today, some couples are inviting poetry writers to capture the blissful vibes on their big day and allow guests to experience their own slice of romance. 

Stein, who served as Belfast’s poet laureate from 2024 through 2025, first started writing live poetry in 2016 — often in tandem with her wife, Amy Tingle, at festivals and weddings. She said, “One of the first times we did live poetry in a significant way was at a music festival at MASS MoCA, the festival was called FreshGrass. That was a whole weekend block of writing poems, and from then on we had people start contacting us for events.” 

Stein said wedding poetry is primarily a gift from the marrying couple to the guests, but that she has also been commissioned to write poems for couples to help immortalize their love.  

“Poetry’s origins are an oral tradition,” she said. “The typewriter has become a little trendy, but I can understand why. It’s a very visceral, intimate exchange between the typist and the person receiving the poem.” 

She said the removal of modern screens, the sheer vulnerability of allowing a stranger to capture you in verse, can be quite profound. “I think it returns people to something really essential in themselves, which is their feelings,” she said.

Guests will often give her just a word or two as a prompt, then she takes it from there. “For weddings, the focus is — for good reason — on the couple getting married,” she said. “But I think the poems allow the experience to linger in the guests differently. I think it creates a tether to those feelings, to what that event is about, that they get to take home with them.”

There’s no improvisational formula for Stein’s live poetry, but she said she draws on the setting, plus her own intuition and experiences for inspiration. She said, “It’s about trusting yourself and committing to the page, which is just true any time I’m moved to write a poem.” Stein said she looks forward to connecting with more lovebirds as spring and summer approach, and that she doesn’t think the age-old tradition will die any time soon.

For live poetry queries, email [email protected].