Life & Wisdom Quote by Adrian Mitchell

Mitchell frames performance as a kind of public intimacy: not confession to friends, but contact with “total strangers.” That phrase matters. It refuses the cozy myth that art is a private diary accidentally published; for him, it’s a deliberate broadcast into the social noise, an attempt to reach people he doesn’t control, can’t predict, may never meet again. The line’s force comes from that risk. Strangers don’t owe you patience. Strangers can walk away. Wanting to “speak” and “sing” to them is less about ego than about urgency: language has to earn its audience in real time.

The subtext is political without waving a banner. Mitchell came up in a Britain where poetry wasn’t just a literary game but a tool for dissent and solidarity, especially in the postwar decades of protest culture. “My way of talking to the world” reads like a modest mission statement, but it also implies that the usual channels of “talking” are compromised - too polite, too bureaucratic, too filtered. Poetry and song become an alternate civic microphone: compressed, memorable, portable.

The intent is also democratic. He’s not speaking upward to institutions or sideways within a clique; he’s speaking outward. By choosing strangers, Mitchell implicitly chooses a public, not a scene. The line captures why his work could be direct, performable, built for rooms and marches as much as pages: art as conversation with the unknown, where the point isn’t purity, it’s contact.