Write Out Loud’s annual open-mic Poetry Jam at Marsden jazz festival will be celebrating its 10th anniversary at the festival next month, at a new venue. This year, on Sunday morning 13 October poets will be gathering in the marquee outside Hanson’s Musical Instruments in Warehouse Hill Road at the usual time of 11am for two hours or so of poetry – and this year one or two special guests are promised. Over the last decade the Write Out Loud Poetry Jam – compered by Write Out Loud’s director and co-founder, Julian Jordon – has enjoyed some special sessions at The Railway pub, a former haunt of poet laureate Simon Armitage.

In 2012 the hiking poet Joe Nodus – also answering to the name of Joe Pleb – looked in to deliver some poems. The following year saw the late and much-missed Jazzman John Clarke, a fixture for many years on the London poetry scene, make a pilgrimage to Marsden to take part, and in a spin-off, jazz-poetry event, The Beat is Back, as well.  

Write Out Loud reviewer Judy Gordon paid her first visit to the jam in 2013 and afterwards wrote this: “The range of poets and ages at the morning session in the welcoming Railway pub was an eye and ear-opener. They were all there - the young, the older and plenty my age. Men, women, boys, girls, the experienced, the learners, the confident, the nervous, the proud, the modest, the loud, the whisperers, the gentle, the threatening. The quality of the work was the most startling thing – all extremely good, some outstanding and yet more simply astonishing. And the subject matter? How about a football, a lonely whale, child neglect, psychopaths, sex, sheds, a mining disaster, retirement, factory work … it went on and on and was a joy from start to finish.”

In 2014 one of the poets that took part, Shaun Bartlett from Perth, was cycling back to Scotland shortly afterwards. We’ve had four sisters singing like the Andrews Sisters, and dressed in US second world war uniforms.

In 2017 primary school pupils from Lily Lane school in Moston, north Manchester stole the show. Last year at The Railway – in what turned out to be the last year at The Railway – it was the usual packed house, well supported by other poetry groups in the region as ever.

In the last few years Write Out Loud has been closely involved with the Marsden the Poetry Village organisation, which is dedicated to raising the profile of poetry even more in this West Yorkshire Pennine village, where Simon Armitage grew up and the dialect poet Samuel Laycock also had his home.

The Write Out Loud Poetry Jam is an occasion where poets from either side of the Pennines and way beyond can meet up and catch up, and share their poetry. Make sure you’re there this year!