Nols Nathankski takes an hour away from festival organising to talk you through what to expect from the Hold Space Poetry Festival 1-5th October 2026 in the Crypt Gallery.

The Crypt Gallery sits under St Pancras New Church on Euston Road. It was a

burial ground until 1854 and an air raid shelter in the war, and 557 people are

still down there. From 1 to 5 October it is also a poetry festival.

Hold Space: From the Depths is the second edition, after seven sold-out nights

in Holy Week this April that produced a zine assembled overnight. This one goes further down. Twelve resident poets have the run of the crypt for five days, writing in it, recording in it, and performing in the evening work that did not exist that morning. The residency is not a retreat. It is an exposure.

In this episode we go into the stone and find out what it does to a poem. What

happens to your line breaks when the room is cold, the light is bad and the

audience is partly dead. Why a church let a queer poetry organisation in. What

it costs to run a festival the Arts Council turned down and the public paid for

instead.

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THE SCHEDULE

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The crypt is open 10am to 6pm daily. Workshops and the open mic are separately

ticketed. Featured poets open each open mic, two or three a night, before the

floor goes to fourteen.

THURSDAY 1 OCTOBER

10am Crypt opens · residency begins · set-up and intentions

3pm Penance Poetry Workshop (3 to 5pm)

3pm The Sacred Space Within (3 to 5pm)

6pm Open mic in the crypt

Featured: Kristal Sisodia · Valera Simonchuk · H

FRIDAY 2 OCTOBER

10am Crypt opens · residency · podcast recordings

6pm Open mic in the crypt

Featured: Byuka Makodru · Nols Nathankski · Luigi Coppola

SATURDAY 3 OCTOBER

10am Crypt opens · residency · live podcast recordings · Zine Day

1pm Trash Fire Poetry: Writing From The Ashes (1 to 3pm)

3pm Disasterpieces (3 to 5pm)

6pm THE GATHERING, upstairs in St Pancras New Church (6 to 9pm)

Featured: Maddy Kilsby-McMurray · Emma Keun

World premiere from Neil Bartlett OBE. No open mic in the crypt tonight.

SUNDAY 4 OCTOBER

10am Crypt opens · residency · podcast recordings

11am Protest Poetry: Defamiliarising Violence (11am to 1pm)

1pm Saying The Unsayable (1 to 3pm)

6pm Open mic in the crypt

Featured: Dr Maria Cohut · Pia Fajelagutan · Bee Wylie

MONDAY 5 OCTOBER

10am Crypt opens · closing day · podcast recording · zine assembly

11am Rediscovering Joy In A Crypt (11am to 1pm)

3pm Penance Poetry Workshop (3 to 5pm)

5pm Stevie's Scary Stories Sharing Circle (5 to 7pm)

6pm Closing open mic in the crypt

Featured: Stevie Grant · Alice Border · Tom Bland

Zine launch and distribution at the close.

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THE WORKSHOPS

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All separately ticketed, all pay what you can, all small. Book individually.

PENANCE POETRY WORKSHOP

Thursday 1 October, 3 to 5pm · and Monday 5 October, 3 to 5pm

Facilitated by Nols Nathankski

Seven poets produce automatic poetry under deliberately restricted conditions.

Over two hours, participants respond to three minute prompts and immediately

perform their poems to the crypt. Poets are limited to pen, paper and water.

Choosing to use a phone, drink alcohol, smoke or otherwise distract oneself

results in becoming an audience member. None have failed yet. No photography or

filming. Since its inception PENANCE has generated over 200 poems performed by

more than 30 poets.

THE SACRED SPACE WITHIN

Thursday 1 October, 3 to 5pm

Facilitated by Kristal Sisodia

A meditative, poetic, psychedelic journey through sound, body and collective

writing. Poetry becomes ritual, sound becomes language, and the body becomes a

place to listen. Kristal works with singing, live instruments, loop station,

meditation and collective writing, asking where poetry comes from, where it

lives in our bodies, and who gets to have access to it. Bring a notebook and

comfortable clothes you can move in. Nothing needs preparing.

REDISCOVERING JOY IN A CRYPT

Friday 2 October, 11am to 1pm

Facilitated by Alice Border

As light and frothy as you can get running a workshop in a crypt. Expect to

write and discuss poetry that takes your ideas somewhere bizarre, somewhere

funny, somewhere surreal, and almost certainly somewhere weird.

TRASH FIRE POETRY: WRITING FROM THE ASHES

Saturday 3 October, 1 to 3pm

Facilitated by Maddy Kilsby-McMurray

A new kind of writing circle, for unblocking your practice. After an initial

prompt the poets make a new piece of work. Each is invited to share it, then

destroy it. The scraps are combined and used to make the next pieces. Challenge

the limits of inspiration and learn to tease new work from the ashes of what came

before. Up to 15 writers, all levels.

DISASTERPIECES

Saturday 3 October, 3 to 5pm

Facilitated by Emma Keun

The world is ending, so come and make a disaster piece. Disasterpiece: disaster

plus masterpiece, a work so ignominious it gains a cult following. Emma uses the

term against the zeitgeist of disaster and collapse that permeates the 21st

century. Apocalyptic poetry, made underground. 15 spaces. Dress for a cold tomb,

bring a pen and a notebook.

PROTEST POETRY: DEFAMILIARISING VIOLENCE

Sunday 4 October, 11am to 1pm

Facilitated by Dr Maria Cohut

Turning anger into poetry, and poetry into an act of protest. What makes a poem

a protest poem? When violence becomes everyday, banal even, how do we push back

against that banalisation through the written and spoken word? Maria works

through examples from the slam and spoken word scene and from classic and

contemporary page poetry, with guided exercises drawn from Viktor Shklovsky's

concept of defamiliarisation. Optional sharing. No experience needed.

SAYING THE UNSAYABLE

Sunday 4 October, 1 to 3pm

Some losses resist language. Grief crouches in the body before it reaches the

tongue. An intimate workshop for twelve poets on grief and loss, through

generative writing, close reading and honest conversation, with the crypt itself

part of the work. Anchor poems by writers who have found form for the formless,

craft techniques for writing at the edge of language, two extended writing

blocks, and a closing circle for optional sharing. Group size kept to twelve for

depth and trust.

STEVIE'S SCARY STORIES SHARING CIRCLE

Monday 5 October, 5 to 7pm

Facilitated by Stevie Grant

Something wicked this way comes. A circle, not a class. Bring a scary story: one

you wrote, one you love, one that has lived rent free in your head since

childhood. Read aloud in candlelight, shiver together, and talk about what makes

a story genuinely frightening and why writers have always been drawn to the dark.

No experience necessary. Just bring something that scares you.

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THE TWELVE RESIDENTS

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PIA FAJELAGUTAN (she/her)

Better known in the literary shadows as Liethers, or The Piss I Call Art, Pia is

an Abu Dhabi-bred word wrangler and left-handed illustrator who turned childhood

scribbles into a full-blown pen name rebellion. By day she hunts talent in the

skies, the aviation world's secret poet. By night, or whenever the caffeine is

strong enough, she brews free verse at open mics, prose, and eccentric

illustrations that wrestle with identity, wanderlust and the occasional

existential hangover. She is the author of the delightfully unhinged debut

Whiskey For The Uninitiated, five years of identity crises, road dust and

self-drawn chaos, and a multilingual poet who firmly believes the best poetry

sneaks in when you are supposed to be adulting. Liethers does not do polished.

She does unfiltered, with a side of feral charm.

EMMA KEUN (she/her)

Emma Keun lives in London. She is published in Kite String II, III and IV,

anthologies for the open mic and poetry community, and in Word Space. She has

four honourable mentions from Dark Poets Club and one highly commended from

Creative Writing Ink. When not performing or writing she attempts building,

sculpting or growing things.

LUIGI COPPOLA (he/him)

Poetry, music, rum and coke. Luigi has featured at Glastonbury Festival, Tate

Modern, Greenwich Theatre, Koestler Arts, the Cutty Sark and the Southbank

Centre's New Poets Collective. He is a Poetry Archive Worldview winner, Bridport

shortlisted, Ledbury and National longlisted, and Lost Souls and Farrago Slam

Champion. He makes music as The Only Emperor, and his debut comes from Broken

Sleep Books. linktr.ee/PoetryPreacher

DR MARIA COHUT (she/they)

Maria is a Romanian writer living in Brighton with her ever-growing family of

Giant African Land Snails, Madagascan hissing cockroaches and stick insects. Her

writing is haunted by questions of identity, belonging, displacement, and what

makes us human. It appears in many online and print publications, including the

Borders & Belonging anthology (Cephalopress, 2022), The Hyacinth Review, The

Hellebore, and The Other Side of Hope: Journeys in Refugee and Immigrant

Literature, and has aired on radio. Her first chapbook, Spatter Pattern (back

room poetry, 2023), explored gender-based violence by reimagining detective

fiction tropes. Multiple Exposures (Flight of the Dragonfly, 2026) is her first

full-length collection, reflecting on becoming uprooted, writing in an adopted

language, and healing fractured identities.

MADDY KILSBY-McMURRAY (they/them)

Maddy is a non-binary poet and writer involved with a number of local creative

and LGBTQIA+ groups. They are a neurodiversity advocate and regularly host talks

sharing their lived experience as an ADHD-er. They volunteer with BCS, working to

improve the tech industry as a whole.

BEE WYLIE (she/her/bee)

Bee is a weird little witchy word smith from the West Midlands. She has been

writing poetry since around 2016 and performing spoken word on the London scene

since 2021, and is a regular at the Word Zoo. She is currently illustrating her

debut book, Dream Weaving, due to be published through Hay House: a collection of

her earlier work, focused on spirituality, reincarnation, grief, the raw nature

of love, and finding light in dark places. She is heavily influenced by her late

mother Louise Wylie, a renowned psychic medium and spiritual teacher who taught

Writing with Spirit at The College of Psychic Studies.

TOM BLAND (he/him)

Tom's first collection and verse novel, Camp Fear, was published by Bad Betty

Press in 2021 and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize in 2022. The book

fuses poetry with satire, surrealism and psychoanalysis, calling on Freud, Artaud

and Acker, 4chan and Lana Del Rey, and inviting the reader into the dark corners

of the human psyche.

STEVIE GRANT (he/him)

Queer Hackney poet, working in the long queer tradition of gothic writing. He

closes the festival with a sharing circle for stories that frighten, held in

candlelight in the crypt. @steviepoems

KRISTAL SISODIA (they/them)

Actor and poet. Kristal weaves voice, rhythm and sound together to guide people

into a deeper relationship with their words, bodies and stories, working with

singing, live instruments, loop station and meditation. Their practice treats

poetry as ritual and the body as a place to listen.

ALICE BORDER (she/her)

Slam-winning performance poet in London and part of the Make Poetry Weird Again

collective. She has headlined everywhere from Somerset House to the Divine

Fringe, and her work has been published by WriteLondon, Crunch and Edition. Key

pieces include The Unsolicited Shit Pic and An Ode To Billingsgate Fish Market.

Her debut pamphlet, Taste Me, is published in October. @alicesayingstuff

H (she/her)

After years of only writing therapeutically, H mysteriously started writing and

performing poetry in early 2025. She revels in surreal social satire, weaving

humour and sadness, language experiments and characters. She likes to express her

tranquilised emotions, and the things she really wishes she had said at the time,

to willing audiences. She has been published in three anthologies: Surrey Poet

Laureate, Lost Souls, and Forge Press' An Anthology Against Hate. She goes by H

because she does not really like her name. Yes, she has a poem about it.

@haitch_speaks

BYUKA MAKODRU (they/them)

Byuka is a trans, disabled and migrant writer working across speculative fiction,

experimental writing and poetry. Their practice spans immersive performance,

ritual facilitation, visual art and publishing, tracing wordscapes through

cross-medium world-building rooted in social justice, displacement, ancestrality,

anti-colonialism, ecology and queerness. Their poetry performance work has been

shared at Ugly Duck, House of Annetta, the Crypt Gallery, QUEERCIRCLE, Ubiskes3

in Lithuania and the Fringe Festival in Poland. In 2025 they facilitated workshops

on poetry as spellcasting and created a deck of poetry oracles for the Burned

House Horizon exhibition at Mimosa House, London. Their current practice explores

psychogeography, deep listening, ritual and writing with ash, using the material

as a portal between the living and the dead, and a channel to the lineages of

witches, women and marginalised people burned at the stake. They connect to

poetry as a tool for liberation and futuring.

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HEADLINE COMMISSION

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NEIL BARTLETT OBE

Poet, novelist, theatre director and translator, and one of the defining figures

of British queer culture. His work across four decades has consistently

interrogated the relationship between queer history, form, and the body politic.

He gives the world premiere of a new commission in St Pancras New Church on

Saturday 3 October, surrounded by sixteen queer poets and four musicians. The

church is carried on caryatids, stone figures holding the roof up with their own

bodies, so we gave him some of his own.

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COME DOWN

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Hold Space: From the Depths · 1 to 5 October 2026

The Crypt Gallery, 165 Euston Road, London NW1 2BA

Part of Bloomsbury Festival 2026, its 20th anniversary year

Day ticket to the crypt, 10am to 6pm, pay what you can to £11

Workshops, separately ticketed, pay what you can

Open mic every evening, separately ticketed

The Gathering, Saturday 3 October, pay what you can to £10

Everything: outsavvy.com/organiser/make-poetry-weird-again

ACCESS

The crypt is reached by a staircase and there is no step-free access. The

Gathering, in the church above, is step free. The crypt is underground and stone

built and it is cold. Bring layers. Anything at all, email

[email protected] and we will be honest with you about what the

building can and cannot do.

CREDITS

Make Poetry Weird Again is made by Nols Nathankski.

Recorded live in The Crypt Gallery.

@makepoetryweirdagain · [email protected]

TAGS

poetry · spoken word · queer · london · poetry festival · crypt ·

bloomsbury festival · neil bartlett · open mic · zine · workshops ·

make poetry weird again

This week Nols welcomes the poet, performer and filmmaker Ernesto Sarezale and, true to form, the whole conversation was recorded with both of them completely naked in Nols's living room. There's a lineage to that: Ginsberg's Howl gave us the "starving hysterical naked," and Ernesto's own film opens on the same lines. So the clothes came off, and what was left was the work, the body, and two people telling the truth to a microphone.

Ernesto is a fixture of London's queer spoken word world. He runs regular open mics, writes across concrete poetry, flash fiction and erotica, works in English and en castellano, and made Queer Tongues a guerrilla-shot documentary feature charting today's queer spoken word scene through live snippets and interviews with more than 38 performers, on sexuality, poetry, performance and the politics of the body. It screened at Brighton & Hove Pride's Film Pride festival.

In this episode

• Recording naked — what it does to a conversation, and why it belongs to the weird tradition
• Queer Tongues and the DIY heart of spoken word: the most accessible, affordable art form there is
• Making work across languages, forms and the erotic
• Ginsberg, Howl, and poetry as a voice for the underrepresented
• Building and holding open-mic community in London

Find Ernesto

• Website: https://www.sarezale.com
• Queer Tongues (film): https://www.sarezale.com/queer-tongues.html
• Trailer: https://vimeo.com/491771210
• Open mics in London: http://www.sarezale.com/events
• Book & poems: https://www.sarezale.com/poems.html

Make Poetry Weird Again — poetry to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. Subscribe, share, and come find us at an event.

Nols Nathankski sits down with Adam de Salle.

Adam will not call himself a poet. He introduces himself as a Senior Library Assistant and an open mic performer, and leaves it there. Other people say the word behind his back.

He is a public librarian in south London, which he'll tell you is not a job about silence at all it's community work, and the last safety net for people falling through every other one. He runs his own open mic in a library and a castle.

He's a fixture at Word Space, White Feather and our very own, Hold Space Open Mic. He came to writing through Burroughs and the cut-up, and he keeps Shakespeare, in his mouth the way other people keep their phone in their pocket.

This episode was recorded while he was in the middle of a heartbreak, and he does not pretend otherwise. What comes out of it is the grief that only love can produce.

Six poems, three three-minute written between them with prompts from @alicesayingstuff , and a lot of talk about libraries.

Find Adam on instagram @adamdesalle

Check out his open mic here -Events & Activities | Eltham Library | Better Libraries

Adam will be at Hold Space Poetry festival from the 1-5th October 2026.

To support the festival please donate at the link below

FUND OUR QUEER POETRY FESTIVAL IN A CRYPT - a Creative & Arts crowdfunding project in London by Nols Nathankski

Nols Nathanksi records underground, in the Crypt Gallery beneath St Pancras Church during HOLD SPACE POETRY FESTIVAL in April 2026, while the Euston Road went on with its own noise a few feet above our heads. We took the Holy Week prompts down with us and used them the way you use a spade. Seven days of betrayal, overturned tables, barren blossom trees, a body washed, a body waiting. Two poets who did not flinch at any of it.

Byuka Makodru @fortunetailedbeast writes with ash and treats the page as a portal. Pia Fajelagutan writes under the name @ThePissICallArt and treats the page as somewhere to spill. Put them in a room built for the dead and give them a liturgy to argue with, and this is what you get. Not a solemn hour. A loud one, mostly, with a few silences in it that we left in on purpose.

In this episode

• The crypt as instrument. What cold brick does to a line before it leaves your mouth
• Writing with ash, deep listening, poetry as spellcasting, and whether the word ritual is doing any real work
• Migration and diaspora, two versions of it, held up against each other
• The alter ego as a permission slip. The Piss I Call Art, and what a name lets you say
• Holy Week borrowed as scaffolding by people the church would rather not have in the building
• The prompt that neither of them wanted to answer, and what happened when they did anyway

Byuka Makodru (they/them) is a trans, disabled and migrant writer working across speculative fiction, experimental writing and poetry, with a practice that runs through immersive performance, ritual facilitation, visual art and publishing. Their crypt installation was written up by Asiimov Baker: a book with honeycomb pages held together by steel wire and black hair, sheets of parchment threaded through, and beside it something like sheet music distended out of all proportion, clefs and staves in black and red, fine as a hair in places and unbearably loud in others. Their work appears in Ache Magazine issue four, an extended issue of feminist writing on illness, health, bodies and pain.

• Ache No. 4: achemagazine.co.uk/issue-no-4
• Epitaph, on the crypt work: asiimovbaker.com/post/epitaph

Pia Fajelagutan (she/her) is a poet, author and illustrator based between Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and London, whose work moves through migration, diaspora, philosophy and language. Her debut collection Whiskey For The Uninitiated became an Amazon bestseller and was carried into signings and appearances at the Emirates Literature Festival. She hosts workshops, performs internationally, and co-curates open mics and readings supporting emerging literary communities across the Middle East and the UK, with recent appearances at Hold Space Poetry Festival, Poetry Supper Club, Writers of Riyadh and the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. Hannah Kate + 2

• Interviewed on Hannah's Bookshelf, North Manchester FM: hannahkate.net

Make Poetry Weird Again. Poetry to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

@makepoetryweirdagain · makepoetryweirdagain.com

Nols gets an email from an unknown poet from Iceland called Nikulás so of course they record a podcast a few days later.

Nik and Nols talk about his writing practice and hopes of sharing his work. Nik talks to leaving his home in Iceland because London and the world was more interesting. He write poems of longing and desperation. Recent work concerns his loss of his grandmother. These poems are sacred things and they came about because Nik sent an email.

Nik and Nols make poems with prompts from the PENANCE workshop. After this episode was recorded Nols conducted the first 7 hour PENANCE LONG DAY where he made 23 further poems.

Nik Shouts out Hollie McNish, Sexquisite, Mary Oliver to name a few.

Follow Nik on instagram @shady_nik_ and reccomend him places to perform.

Follow Nols @nolsnathankski

Follow Make Poetry Weird Again @makepoetryweirdagain

Nols meets a Willie Leo Coakley, legend of New York Queer Poetry at the Open Mic!

Eighty-eight years is a long time to keep faith with a line of verse. William Leo Coakley has managed it. Poet writer and peace activist. Lover of men.

Nols sits down with him to ask the one question worth asking a man who has done a thing that long: how. How do you keep the appetite?

Coakley had an enemy a good one. Allen Ginsberg: the great howler, the Beat saint with his harmonium and his drug fuelled congregation, Coakley's poetry set its face against it. Coakley kept the old European hush, the rhyme, the measure. They shared a city and a century and could not abide one another. Coakley, quietly, is the one still here to tell the story.

He is also the man who once put Thom Gunn into print on Helikon Press, the queer press he ran with his lover of 48 years.

Thom Gunn, that other queer formalist who crossed from England to America and turned leather and grief and plague into stanzas built to hold. To have published Gunn and outlasted Ginsberg is a whole education in what poetry is actually for, and Coakley hands it over here.

This is an hour with a living archive who flatly refuses to behave like one.

The guest. William Leo Coakley New York poet, formalist, translator. His poems have appeared since 1958 in the Paris Review, the Nation, the London Magazine, Christopher Street and elsewhere across America, England, Ireland and Mexico, and he was chosen for the Discovery series at the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center. His poem "Horses Burning" took a prize in the Sotheby's International Poetry Competition, and his translation of Cavafy won the Der-Hovanessian Prize from the New England Poetry Club. He has recited Yeats at the Irish Repertory Theatre, Dickinson at the Botanical Garden, and his own poems at the Leslie-Lohman Museum. Publisher of Thom Gunn. Adversary, at a distance, of Allen Ginsberg.

Recorded in Holy Week, beneath the St Pancras New church, among the 557 dead that reside there. Nols makes poems with HOLD SPACE poetry festival residents Emma Keun and Maria Cohut.

Some voices you have to go down to reach. This one we recorded in the dark of Holy Week, in the crypt where sixteen poets kept their residency like a wake that refused to be sad; candlewax and cold stone and the particular electricity of people making things they were not sure they were allowed to make. What you'll hear is two poets in the season of descent: burial, waiting, the rumour of a door.

Here is the resurrection joke the calendar hides since we pressed record, both have come up out of the ground and headlined the HOLDSPACE open mic. Whatever was buried in April is walking around now, taking the mic, refusing to stay quiet. Poetry to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed, as ever.

In this episode

• What it does to a poem to be written and read below ground — the crypt as instrument, not backdrop
• Migration, identity, and writing in an adopted tongue (Maria's long theme, sharpened)
• The detective and the confessor: crime-fiction form as a way into unspeakable things
• Holy Week as a working structure for grief, not just belief
• Nols makes a freestyle based on emma's vape.

Maria Cohut Brighton-based poet of Romanian origin, haunted (her word, and we let her keep it) by identity, migration, defamiliarisation, and the complexity of being a person among other people. Her debut collection Multiple Exposures (Flight of the Dragonfly Press, March 2026) reads migration as a mode of being and identity as a thing you develop, photographically, in layers. Her earlier chapbook Spatter Pattern (back room poetry, 2023) walks into the subject of gendered violence wearing the coat of detective fiction.

Find Maria's work:

• Multiple Exposures (Flight of the Dragonfly Press, 2026) — via the other side of hope: https://othersideofhope.com/diary.html
• Spatter Pattern (back room poetry, 2023): https://backroompoetry.co.uk/
• Poems at The Hellebore: https://thehellebore.com/maria-cohut/
• Poems at The Hyacinth Review: https://hyacinthreview.org/author/maria-cohut/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mariac_phd/

Emma Keun Blakean Bard of the open mic is a london poet published in several major anthologies - influenced by fan fiction and queer tragedy. Emma makes every space she speaks at both sensual and spiritual while dealing with themes of embarrassment, the grotesque and the cruel haunting friction of love... A crypt resident, HOLDSPACE headliner and friend of the show!

Her debut pamphlet will be released by MAKE POETRY WEIRD AGAIN - watch this space!

Find Emma's work:

• @elkwrites000555

In February 2026 Nols Nathankski had the honour of sitting down with Robert Stanley Adams: a 73-year-old Canadian poet who writes from the seam where the divine and the erotic are not two things but one breath. This podcast only happened because Robert walked out of the open mic with Nol's coat!

Some books arrive late because they had to be lived first. After a chance meeting at the Word Zoo open mic one of those London nights where the holy walks in off the street a myth was made. Robert has just published The Book of Love, a summation of twenty years of writing and of spiritual-sexual practice a lifetime's apprenticeship in holy love, finally bound. He's joined by his daughter Tamar, his baby granddaughter (the youngest guest this podcast has ever hosted), and his editor Lia, the midwife of the manuscript.

Together they ask the question the work itself keeps asking: why has it taken so long for a voice like Robert's to reach the world and what does it mean to give your whole life to love, and only now hand it over?

Robert on the marriage of the divine and the erotic body as scripture, desire as a way of prayer. Twenty years of practice distilled into one volume. Lia on editing a life rather than a manuscript. Tamar on growing up inside this work, and carrying it forward with a daughter of her own now in the room. And the long question of belated recognition: what the world misses when it isn't listening, and what it gains when it finally is.

LINKS

• @robert.stanley.adams
• @flamencolia.official
• @the_word_zoo

MAKE POETRY WEIRD AGAIN

poetry to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed

makepoetryweirdagain.com ·Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/mpwa

If this episode gave you something, consider supporting MPWA so we can keep making it.

Subscribe, share, and come find us at an event.

This week Nols is joined by Mikey Kirkpatrick flautist, singer, composer, improviser and performer and writer, who makes work for street, stage, film and radio. Mikey records and tours internationally as Bird Radio, his singular take on new British folk (voice, flutes, loops, bones, homemade instruments and the famous red suitcase kick drum). He’s an associate lecturer at Goldsmiths and founding director of Alchemy, a collective of artists, teachers and mentors working with young people at risk of exclusion, and he teaches Music, Healing and Deep Listening for Morbid Anatomy in New York.

Nols and Mikey met at the Octave Marathon at the Old Church in Stoke Newington. The event was a way to raise money to save one of the most unique arts space and consecrated church in london.

Donate below or buy the album! (Nols is on it ;) )

Save The Old Church N16 Music and Community Venue - a Creative & Arts crowdfunding project in London by The Old Church Stoke Newington

The Octave Marathon (Fundraiser for The Old Church Community Arts Venue in Hackney, London) | Various Artists | Bird Radio

Nols and Mikey go looking for the music in everything including poetry. Mikey opens up his many daily creative practices and the threads that hold them together, and traces the extraordinary journeys behind the music and the writing. They talk about what it means to be a pillar of a creative community, and the genuinely impressive work Mikey does with young people in London building shelter for them to make, listen, and find their own voices.

Find Mikey & Bird Radio

• Website: https://mikeykirkpatrick.wordpress.com

• The Residency (Substack): https://mikeykirkpatrick.substack.com

• Music (Bird Radio on Bandcamp): https://birdradio.bandcamp.com

• Alchemy at Goldsmiths: https://sites.gold.ac.uk/alchemy

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikeykirkpatrick

MAKE POETRY WEIRD AGAIN

poetry to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed

makepoetryweirdagain.com ·Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/mpwa

If this episode gave you something, consider supporting MPWA so we can keep making it.

Subscribe, share, and come find us at an event.

Nols and Ameer make poems on the first day of Hold Space Poetry festival on April fools day 2026

Ameer Azad is a Pakistani-Bengali poet and author living in London. His work often covers surrealism, social satire and spirituality. Usually seen yelling at open mics in a scary voice.

In this episode, Nols and Ameer write to a set of prompts and talk through making poems when no one knows where you come from.

Prompts (provided by Chloe Smith of Skibbable open mic)

Shout-outs

• The Never Press
• Wordspace
• Resonance Poetry
• Chloe Smith / Skibbable open mic

Make Poetry Weird Again is a Queer experimental poetry organisation based in north London. Poetry to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

The Crypt Gallery and Make Poetry Weird Again Present HOLD SPACE POETRY FESTIVAL: From The Depths 1-5th October 2026.

HOLD SPACE POETRY FESTIVAL DAY TICKET Tickets | Multiple Dates @ Crypt Gallery, London | Pay What You Can to £11 | OutSavvy

@makepoetryweirdagain

• https://ko-fi.com/makepoetryweirdagain