Wandering the land, collecting people’s stories, hanging out in coffee shops contemplating our existence, performing to crowds in the open air – the life of a poet is often portrayed like a romantic fantasy.

But for the last eight months Walthamstow’s Aisling Fahey has been living that exact dream after being named The Young Poet Laureate for London.

The 22-year-old has been working with community groups, from pensioners to schoolchildren, during five residencies around the city, and is now gearing up to perform at Walthamstow Garden Party and Latitude.

“It’s going so quickly,” she says speaking to me from, you guessed it, a buzzing coffee shop in Piccadilly.

“The residencies are the mainstay and then it is quite open to what you want to do with it and what I wanted was to bring poetry to a wider audience.”

A large chunk of her time has been spent encouraging the next generation of writers by mentoring pupils from four Waltham Forest secondary schools as part of Barbican Junior Poets, alongside South African poet Toni Stuart and Barbican Young Poet Kareem Parkins-Brown. Over the past six months she has helped the 24 young pupils work on writing, editing, giving each other feedback and performing their work.

“It’s amazing working with that age group as they just surprise you continuously,” says Aisling, “you think ‘wow, how do you know so much at such a young age’ and you think about how they are overlooked sometimes.

“When you hear the experiences they have the way they articulate themselves it really blows you away. It’s really incredible being able to hear them.”

Next week she will lead them as they present a series of poems on stage at Walthamstow Garden Party, and Aisling herself will be performing a new piece of as yet unnamed work that she has recently written (see extracts right).

“The culmination will be at the Garden Party,” says Aisling, a former Holy Family Catholic School pupil who became a member of Barbican Young Poets herself aged 15.

“There is going to be a stage dedicated to spoken word with performances from the juniors, the young poets, professional poets and an open mic. It will be a really lovely mix with a real intergenerational feel.

“There is a beautiful poem called Tottenham and also a group poem about journeys and what you see on your way from home to school which personifies Walthamstow Market in a really inventive way.”

Another memorable project for her has been getting the chance to go on site at the Olympic Stadium in the Queen Elizabeth Park as it is transformed into West Ham United FC’s new home.

“I was interviewing some of the workers on site and what interests me in my poetry is to focus in on the people and figure out where it is they are coming from and again unlock their stories, I have another couple of days on site and then I’ll be writing a poem about my time there.”

The role has also allowed her to meet some of her idols and find out what it takes to make a career out of poetry as a few weeks ago she was invited to Ireland to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nobel-prize wining poet William Butler Yeats alongside Carol Anne Duffy and the national Poet Laureates for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

“It was incredible to be on stage alongside people that I had studied and written essays about. Just seeing how they are with an audience was enough advice in itself.”

Aisling has another residency coming up at Our Lady of St George School and will be performing at Latitude before handing over the role of Young Laureate on National Poetry Day at the start of October.

The poets perform at Walthamstow Garden Party on Sunday, July 19 from 12.30pm to 2.30pm. Book open mic slots via email at: creative.learning@barbican.org.uk