Blakefest, Bognor Regis, 2019
The visionary poet and painter William Blake only lived in the Sussex village of Felpham for a couple of years - just enough time to begin writing Jerusalem and to be cleared at Chichester assizes of assaulting a solider and uttering seditious expressions against the king. But it was quite long enough for the arts community of nearby Bognor Regis to commemorate him in the 21st century with a festi...
10th July 2021
Hello to a new look at our archives
With mixed feelings, Write Out Loud is marking the gradual return to live-venue poetry by ending its ‘We’ll Meet Again’ feature, which helped to keep us going during the dark days of total pandemic lockdown with reminders of just what fun live poetry used to be. But we’ve enjoyed looking back throug...
4th June 2021
Poems for Jeremy Corbyn, London, 2016
The news that the anthology Poems for Jeremy Corbyn was being reprinted because of its popularity, reported right at the start of its launch at Housman’s radical bookshop in London, probably received ...
10th May 2021
Wendy Cope, Teddington, 2017
People should do some work in the “real world” before embarking on a career in poetry. That is the advice of Wendy Cope, who was a primary school teacher and also worked for the Inner London Eduction ...
27th April 2021
Hollie McNish, Salena Godden, Manchester, 2016
I reckon that if you’re a spoken word virgin you might as well start at the top and my friend certainly did that when I took him to see Hollie McNish and Salena Godden at Gorilla, an event that was pa...
15th April 2021
Louise Fazackerley, Huddersfield, 2014
To see a world in a grain of sand, wrote Blake, and heaven in a wild flower. On Thursday, the Risk a Verse audience at Milnsbridge, Huddersfield, was shown a world with which most of us were unfamilia...
3rd April 2021
Anti-slam, London, 2016
“Welcome to the worst night of your lives!” That was the enticing introduction from host Dan Simpson at the start of the Anti Slam Apocalypse, a grand UK final of anti-slammers from around the country...
20th March 2021
Ranting poets, London, 2015
Back in the 1980s, Ranting poets were very angry - angry about the conditions that led to the inner city riots, angry about the miners’ strike, angry about unemployment, and a host of other issues. No...
9th March 2021
Poetry Book Fair, London, 2017
Free Verse’s Poetry Book Fair at Conway Hall in London would still draw the crowds, even if it was just about selling books – but it is always a lot more than that. The event, built up by organisers C...
26th February 2021
Urdu poetry, London, 2016
It was an extraordinary moment, for me, at any rate. Early on during a talk about a famous South Asian poet his words were read out in Urdu – and many of the audience began joining in, knowing them wo...
15th February 2021
Laura Taylor, London, 2018
Laura Taylor is a force of nature, worth abandoning a quiet life of retirement and taking the train to that London to hear. That London? Yes, Laura is a popular performance poet at festivals and clubs...
5th February 2021
The Hundred Years' War anthology, Newbury, 2015
The Hundred Years’ War, a touring production of modern war poetry in performance inspired by the Bloodaxe anthology, has the barest of sets – a table, two teacups and saucers, a few stools and an acco...
25th January 2021
National Poetry Day, Southbank Centre, London, 2014
The new Forward prize winner, Kei Miller, looked out at the audience, smiled, and apologised for the downbeat nature of his final poem on National Poetry Day Live at the Southbank Centre in London. Hi...
14th January 2021
Roger McGough and Little Machine, Farnham, 2017
Roger McGough turns 80 next month. Yet the esteemed Liverpudlian remains the epitome of cool, a consummate performance poet, and should have been appointed laureate years ago. Why not have a poet that...
26th December 2020
Martin Luther King anniversary anthology, Newcastle, 2017
Fifty years ago – on 13 November 1967 – the civil rights activist Dr Martin Luther King received an honorary doctorate in civil law from Newcastle University, the only university in the UK to so honou...
18th December 2020
Carol Ann Duffy and Little Machine, London, 2015
A packed Emanuel School hall in Battersea, the stage lit with flickering candles and draped with red roses, the Dark Rose for Christmas album artwork provided an atmospheric backdrop. A silver-grey wi...
8th December 2020
Frieda Hughes, Much Wenlock, 2014
Frieda Hughes gave up writing poetry in her 20s because she could not bear to be constantly compared with her parents, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, she told a Wenlock poetry festival audience on Satur...
29th November 2020
Jeremy Reed, Aldeburgh, 2015
Jeremy Reed added a touch of sparkle – quite a few touches of sparkle, in fact – to the Aldeburgh poetry festival on Friday night. Sprinkling handfuls of blue glitter into the air at regular intervals...
21st November 2020
Louise Fazackerley, Manchester, 2016
In the week that a headteacher gave pyjama-clad parents a dressing-gown dressing down, Manchester’s Z-Arts’ Family Theatre invited audience and staff to turn up thus clad to both Saturday showings of ...
14th November 2020
Andrew Motion and the poetry of war, 2015
When the BBC sent Andrew Motion to talk to Harry Patch, who was then Britain’s last surviving first world war solder, and who died in 2009 at the age of 111, it was “my most interesting commission whi...
7th November 2020
Tony Walsh, London, 2015
One of spoken word’s leading ambassadors and heroes, Tony Walsh, came down south from the north-west on Thursday night to tread the boards of a former Victorian music hall in London.
Walsh was topp...
21st October 2020
Write Out Loud Poetry Jam, Marsden, 2016
The annual Write Out Loud poetry jam at Marsden? That’s just another open mic, isn’t it? Well, no, actually. This is the fifth consecutive year I’ve attended the yearly shindig on the Sunday morning o...
8th October 2020
Lorna Goodison and Kei Miller, Manchester, 2014
This Poets and Players event was staged as part of Manchester literature festival at the wonderful Halle St Peter’s, one of Manchester best performance spaces. There was such a big turnout, the pre-sh...
30th September 2020
International Poetry Reincarnation, London, 2015
It was a day when the anecdotes just kept on coming. Allen Ginsberg was “very, very drunk, and quite angry that he had been kept waiting for so long” when he finally got up to perform at the first Int...
20th September 2020
George the Poet, London, 2014
I missed George the Poet at Latitude after he sent word that he was stuck on a train. On Wednesday night at Out-Spoken in the heart of Camden there came a message that he was delayed in south London....
11th September 2020
Roger McGough, London, 2014
Roger McGough has any number of very funny poems. As he explained at his reading at the Troubadour in London on Monday night, ‘Mermaid and Chips’ is “about pubescent longing – but mainly about chips”...
2nd September 2020
Tribute to Seamus Heaney, London, 2013
The world of poetry paid tribute in words and music to Seamus Heaney on Wednesday night at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, in a moving celebration of his work and life, with leading poets deli...
20th August 2020
Maxine Peake, Shelley's The Masque of Anarchy, Manchester, 2013
As I started to write this I realised I had absent-mindedly typed The Masque of Energy - an apt Freudian slip after this fiery performance surged through the huge Manchester International Festival aud...
13th August 2020
Poetry bike tour, South Downs, 2016
Six poets and two musicians on Tuesday set off on the first leg of a four-day, 100-mile poetry bike tour of the South Downs as part of an inaugural poetry festival stretching from East and West Sussex...
6th August 2020
Jackie Hagan, Manchester, 2015
The force of nature that is poet and writer Jackie Hagan performed her show Some People Have Too Many Legs at Manchester’s Contact theatre to an adoring crowd of family, friends and fans. She said it ...
30th July 2020
John Agard, Portsmouth, 2015
John Agard makes free with anachronisms – indeed, they are part of the joke. Arriving on stage in historic dress as Christopher Columbus, but with a shopping trolley, he extracts various items from it...
23rd July 2020
Land of Three Rivers anthology launch, Gateshead, 2017
Music and poetry collaborated to produce an unforgettable night showcasing the north-east’s regional pride and identity at the Sage in Gateshead on Friday, where musicians, dancers and schoolchildren ...
16th July 2020
After Trump: an artistic and poetic reminder of America's Great Migration
A week after the shock of America’s supposed liberal values being trumped by bigly bigotry, the country’s apparently ingrained red neck having been thus exposed, I had the privilege of attending an e...
9th July 2020
Poetry at the Parsonage, Haworth, 2016
A new kind of poetry festival – certainly one that I haven’t seen before – was born at the weekend, in the “creative hotspot” of the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth, West Yorkshire.
In the same setting...
2nd July 2020
Hollie McNish in Manchester, 2015
I was expecting her to be polished and professional. I was expecting her to be entertaining and enthralling. What I was not expecting was to be laughing like a drain for the majority of her show. Holl...
26th June 2020
Simon Armitage in Washington DC, 2015
Simon Armitage is famously from Marsden, as is Write Out Loud. I walked past his dad the other day, during my morning constitutional; and here I was attending his and Peter Oswald’s reading at the Fol...
20th June 2020
Jo Bell, London, 2015
A journey through Jo Bell’s three years as canal laureate took place at Little Venice in London on Wednesday night, involving, among other things, kingfishers, dry docks, the enormous Caen Hill flight...
11th June 2020
Kate Tempest, Manchester, 2014
I’ll be honest, dear readers, I expected to hate this performance at Manchester’s Contact theatre as part of the literature festival. There is so much hype and bluster around Tempest, what with a Merc...
4th June 2020
Wendy Cope, Folkestone, 2015
Ted Hughes is said to have told Wendy Cope in 1992: “I like your deadpan fearless sort of way of whacking the nail on the head – when everybody else is trying to hang pictures on it.”
Cope is still...
28th May 2020
Elvis McGonagall, Teddington, 2014
“Elvis,” compere Julie Mullen confided to her audience, “is in the building.” And what a building! “You did say it was deconsecrated?” the legendary resident of Graceland Caravan Park inquired later, ...
21st May 2020
Paul Muldoon and Don Paterson, Manchester, 2013
The shadow of the late Seamus Heaney loomed large over this evening of poetry reading – he should have been there. As Don Paterson, sadly but brilliantly standing in for the maestro, told the packed a...
14th May 2020
Liz Lochhead in Devizes, 2014
Scotland’s makar, Liz Lochhead, is trying out new poetry for her forthcoming Edinburgh show later this summer. Poems like ‘Song for a Dirty Diva’ might be suitable for the Fringe, but Devizes on a Sun...
7th May 2020
Joy France in Manchester, 2013
Mention the word 'Joy' to any northern poet and they might well respond “Balls!”, but not for the reasons you'd suppose. ‘Balls’ just happens to be the title and subject matter for one of Joy France...
30th April 2020
JB Barrington in Manchester, 2014
I Swear I was There, this third evening of poetry/comedy/music created and hosted by Salford’s own JB Barrington (aka WordsEscapeMe) at the Nag’s Head in Manchester, was packed to the gunnels. And rig...
24th April 2020
Luke Wright in London, 2016
I first saw Luke Wright’s What I Learned From Johnny Bevan, which focuses on the broken dreams of the Tony Blair years, almost a year ago, at its debut performance on a Saturday lunchtime in Shropshir...
16th April 2020
John Hegley in Manchester, 2012
The magnificently shabby surroundings of Gullivers in Oldham Street, Manchester, provided the backdrop for what turned out to be a hugely entertaining bill on Wednesday night. The last time I scaled ...
10th April 2020
Roger McGough and Brian Patten, in Liverpool, 2017
So, there I was, back in the city were I once spent three gloriously happy, if challenging years working and living; a city with a certain notoriety; a creative, canny, cocksure yet caring community; ...
2nd April 2020
Carol Ann Duffy at Manchester literature festival, 2015
An Evening with Carol Duffy at the Manchester literature festival was billed as the launch of the poet laureate’s first collected poems, but there was a slight hitch – no book. The German printer has ...
26th March 2020
Linton Kwesi Johnson and Hollie McNish in Liverpool, 2016
Saturday night saw me taking the train into Liverpool to see one of my all-time heroes – the legendary Linton Kwesi Johnson. Even better, he was being supported by one of my more recent all-time heroe...
21st March 2020
