You will all, as licence payers, be pleased to learn that, despite the surely implicit promise in the title, the position of BBC Scotland Poet in Residence doesn't actually come with a house as part of the deal. "Oh no," Rachel McCrum laughs when I ask if there's an actual residence thrown in. "I should have negotiated harder."

We are sitting in the reception of Pacific Quay, a building she will presumably be getting very used to over the next three months as the very first poet in residence in the broadcasting organisation. She is excited about the prospect. But what will it entail, Rachel? Is there an output required in the next 12 weeks? And what might that be? Two poems? 12 poems? 122 poems?

"The initial idea was that there would be 12 commissions. One of my queries was 'is that 12 poems directly? Or are there other ways to explore that?'"

Maybe it will be possible to do crowdsourced poems, she thinks. Maybe film poems or sound poems. "I've come from a spoken word background and group poetry, and to me it's not just about going somewhere, observing something which is quite internal and closed and going 'okay, well my very specific response to it is this.'"

But, yes, she will write the odd poem too. That's after she finishes the one she is writing for National Poetry Day later this week. "It's not quite finished, but it will be."

McCrum is 33, bright-eyed, enthusiastic and Northern Irishly accented. She loves Sylvia Plath. ("She's really funny and really angry. That perception of her as the tragic victim is changing.") And comic book movies. Originally from Donaghadee, she's now resident in Edinburgh, plugged into the city's spoken word poetry scene and making a living – of a sort – as a poet. "It's been hard and sometimes you're broke and sometimes you haven't had an invoice paid for three months and that's frustrating but I've never felt utterly depressed or trapped. I felt that in other jobs." The BBC post is a paid one thankfully, one worth £4000 for the three-month residence.

With her friend Jenny Lindsay she is part of performance poetry duo Rally & Broad and she helps run the Inky Fingers collective based in the Forest Cafe. And whatever the likes of Jeremy Paxman says about poetry's irrelevance (remember his "connived at its own irrelevance" comment from last year?) the form is on an upswing. And it's not just that Carol Ann Duffy's role as poet laureate has helped it catch the tide. At grassroots level performance poetry in particular is hugely fertile. Basically, McCrum says, Edinburgh is a city hoaching with poetry nights. (I'm paraphrasing slightly. The word hoaching may not have passed her lips.)

"I think it is incredibly vibrant and diverse," she says. "You've got groups like Loud Poets who have really focused on that American slam style which you see young people learning from YouTube. There's people like Ross Sutherland and Hannah Silva who are crossing that boundary between theatre and they are generating stage shows using technology visuals using loop pedals. You've also got the avant garde poetry scene in Edinburgh. That is small, but exists. So there's lot of different pockets. But it's energised."

So is she. Maybe she feels there is a need to make up for lost time. After writing poetry as a child and then a teenager she stopped after going to university and has only come back to it in the last five years, when she moved to Scotland, didn't know many people and had a bit of time on her hands.

"For me it's a way of processing information and communicating it back to the world. As you can tell, I tend to ramble quite a lot when I'm just in conversation and my magpie brain goes all over the place. But having the space to follow my thoughts throw, to expand, to circle back, to get a clarity to them, that's why I enjoy writing poetry because it's a clearer way of communicating honestly. But there's also a joy in language. There's really good fun in putting words together."

Now she'll be doing that for the BBC. She grew up in Northern Ireland seeing the organisation as something to rely on. "It was something we trusted as a source of reporting."

Last year, though, she came out as a Yes voter. I wonder does she still feel that trust, given that many on the Yes side were critical of the BBC's role in the independence referendum campaign?

She does, she says. "I think it strives to be impartial. That's something to be respected." And, she adds, it offers a chance to get beyond the echo chamber of like minds on Twitter and Facebook.

"If me and a lot of my social media friends had used our social media feeds as the one source of information about the way the referendum was going to go, of course, it was going to be yes. Everybody we knew was voting yes. And that wasn't true. And we realised very quickly afterwards that actually we weren't engaged with a heck of a lot of the country because you become trapped in these little bubbles of people who think the same way as you. I think sometimes when you get caught up with social media you lose sight of the narrowness of that the limits of that reach."

McCrum grew up looking at Scotland. Living in the small seaside town of Donaghadee on the Ards Peninsula she could see Portpatrick from her window. It was a middle class North Down childhood, she says. She was "bookwormish", sailed, played piano.

Politics – and in particular the politics of that place and time – were not explicitly discussed or explored, she says. "I'll not say my parents weren't politically engaged but we were not encouraged to explore it."

She commuted to Belfast for her secondary education and so was in the city through the last bitter years of the Troubles, for the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and the award of the peace prize to David Trimble and John Hume. Not that that impacted on her plans. "There was this sense that you would leave, you would go elsewhere to complete your education, to build your life and your career."

Elsewhere meant Oxford University. It's where she read Seamus Heaney and started to get a grip on where she had come from. "Sitting in a fresher's room in Oxford going 'what am I doing here?' and then reading something that explained home, which I was always very confused about."

The learning she loved. She's not sure about everything else though. "I have mixed feelings about Oxford in all honesty. It gave me an incredible grounding in English literature which I then proceeded to ignore from the age of 21 to 30."

But, she worries that it doesn't really allow you to do all the things you should be doing at the end of your teens. "The pace is so quick you don't have time to do anything else; how you explore other interests and grow up and fail and get back up again, which I think is an essential part. There's really not a lot of space for those things."

After university she went to New Zealand for a year to volunteer on organic farms. She rode horses, chased cattle, fell in love, learned to snowboard, ditched her plan to study Irish Theatre in Dublin, came to Edinburgh to do a Masters in environmental sustainability "not knowing that much about it", moved to Manchester to work as a management consultant which was, she implies but doesn't specifically say, something of a big mistake, moved into arts research and then was offered a PHD at St Andrews before drifting back to Edinburgh and into the spoken word poetry scene. "My twenties were a bit wandery. I think it took me until the age of 30 to work out what I was doing."

She hated the idea of performing her poems initially. She did a course at the Forest Cafe which was to culminate in a reading. She hated the idea, stormed off a late train from Manchester straight onto the stage still not wanting to do it only to realise "this is all right".

Now she can't get enough of it. "I became involved in this community which was all about grassroots, which was all about open mikes and which was all about standing up and doing it. I found my community. And that helped me get involved in the wider literature scene in Edinburgh and it expanded and expanded. So I feel I have an active participation in my various communities now."

What does that mean? It means Rachel McCrum feels at home here, BBC house or not.