MAKE POETRY WEIRD AGAIN

How to Make Poetry on a Raft in London, with Chiara AmbrosioRecorded on the Sunday after All Hallows, with the veil still thin, Nols sits down with the filmmaker, visual artist and poet Chiara Ambrosio to talk about rivers, radio static, grief, and the rooms we build so that we can dream in them.Chiara’s first poem was Wings of Desire, watched at seven. Her second was the sea at the toe of Italy. Her grandfather, an orthopaedic surgeon and radio ham, taught her to tune: to turn a dial until the hiss becomes a voice. She has been doing that with cities ever since.We talk about mudlarking on the Thames foreshore and the art of “getting your eye in”, Jeremy Reed hunting for clockmakers’ garnets for a sick friend, Iain Sinclair’s ghosts, and why London’s brick catches you while its glass lets you slide off. We talk about Michael Ende’s Momo and the grey men who steal our time, about asking for help in a culture that teaches you not to, and about the difference between friendship and networking (one is a pleasure; the other is talking to people you don’t like in the hope of getting somewhere you don’t want to go).At the centre of it all is Raft – A London Story, Chiara’s film-poem about the city, born at the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury, a seventeenth-century infirmary for horses that became a sanctuary for misfits under the late Roger K Burton. Chiara reads “The Hospital” from The Book of Raft, and tells the story of RAFT – A Fragile Display, her month-long residency there in the summer of 2022: twenty-seven consecutive nights of performance, a shrine of left-behind objects, and a pram pushed home through Queen Square at two in the morning by Chiara and her partner, the musician Mikey Kirkpatrick, whose flute and music run all through the project.Released on the centenary of John Berger’s birth, a man whose spirit runs all the way through this conversation.See it: Raft – A London Story screens at the Horse Hospital this Saturday, 7 November, in a triple bill with work by The Parlour Collective and Joseph Despins’s 1976 musical The Moon Over The Alley, with an opening performance from Bird Radio and James Hesford. Doors 6.30pm, films from 7pm sharp. £10, or £15 solidarity. https://www.thehorsehospital.com/events/raftparlourmoonThe film, and the Raft radio archive: https://raftalondonstory.com/Chiara Ambrosio: http://acuriousroom.com/ENTER.htmlMentioned: Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders) · Jeremy Reed · Derek Jarman · Iain Sinclair · Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography · Michael Ende, Momo · William Blake’s birthday on the steps · Bloomsday · Roberto Calasso, The Tablet of Destinies · Downtown 81 · Gavin Bryars, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet · Marina Warner · David Graeber · The Museum of Homelessness, Finsbury Park · the Chelsea Hotel · David Lynch · John BergerChapters 00:00 Welcome, and the turn into All Souls 00:40 Wings of Desire and the sea in Calabria 03:16 The Thames, mudlarking and looking up from the cesspit 05:27 Jeremy Reed’s garnets and getting your eye in 07:11 The radio ham grandfather and the art of tuning 09:54 Books as the first raft; drawing as improvisation; falling into film 13:57 St Martin’s in Soho, and building a world for yourself 16:05 London changing, and what is actually criminal about it 19:39 AI, the body, and the Pope’s unlikely good sense 24:05 Letters, time, and Momo 26:33 Walking as practice; brick versus glass 30:03 Moving through the city preceded by ghosts 35:46 The Horse Hospital and the origins of Raft 48:35 RAFT – A Fragile Display: twenty-seven nights 51:05 The Book of Raft and John Berger 52:35 Flow, asking, and the Museum of Homelessness 01:01:23 Readings: Calasso, and “The Hospital” 01:09:00 Roger Burton, and Saturday’s triple bill 01:12:43 Artists as saints, and work that stays in the present tense 01:16:55 Writing for an imagined audience; 27 nights without exhaustion 01:22:00 What comes next: film as medicine

Nols Nathankski comes back up out of the crypt after the second Hold Space Poetry Festival and makes this episode after an evening with Neil Bartlett and Richard Scott at the London Review of Books on the 29th October 2026, they were talking about the reissue of Derek Jarman’s Kicking the Pricks: The Last of England. It’s an episode about queer ancestors and queer saints, the cesspit and the blue, Jarman the gardener, worth and the nation, and what you pull up when you throw a bucket down a well. With Blake’s “The Sick Rose” and five poems from the October Penance workshops in the crypt.The bookDerek Jarman, Kicking the Pricks: The Last of England (Prototype Publishing, 2026), with new poems by Richard Scotthttps://prototypepublishing.co.uk/product/kicking-the-pricks/Neil Bartlett OBE - Neil is a director, performer, translator and writer, born in 1958, and was made an OBE in 2000. His first book, Who Was That Man?, traced how the gay London of the 1890s shaped his own life as a gay man in the 1980s. He co-founded the production company Gloria in 1988 and ran the Lyric Hammersmith from 1994 to 2004. His novels include Skin Lane, The Disappearance Boy and Address Book. In 2016 he read the whole of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis aloud in the chapel of Reading Prison, where Wilde was held. He gave a world premiere at our Hold Space Poetry Festival in the Crypt on 3 October 2026.https://www.neil-bartlett.comRichard ScottRichard is a poet, born in London in 1981, who trained as a singer before turning to poetry. His pamphlet Wound (Rialto) won the Michael Marks Award in 2016. His first collection, Soho (Faber, 2018), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Costa Poetry Award, and was a Gay’s The Word book of the year. His second, That Broke into Shining Crystals (Faber, 2025), is built from sequences on still-life paintings and crystals. He lectures in creative writing at Goldsmiths and teaches at the Faber Academy. A new suite of his flat sonnets appears in the 2026 reissue of Kicking the Pricks.https://poetrysociety.org.uk/poets/richard-scottDerek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage, DungenessWhere MPWA is headed in autumn 2027.https://creativefolkestone.org.uk/prospect-cottageAlso honorably mentioned Jarman’s films Imagining October, The Last of England and Blue · Angus Irvine’s show at the Crypt GalleryComing up11 November: Crypt zine launch and open mic at HWK, with the Crypt poetsMAKE POETRY WEIRD AGAIN: OPEN MIC Tickets | 11 Nov @ HWK LONDON, London | Pay What You Can to £7 | OutSavvy7 December: Proper Poetry with R.O. Dodgson, MPWA’s last event of the yearGet in touchSend poems, episode ideas and responses to [email protected] poems.

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 aburial ground until 1854 and an air raid shelter in the war, and 557 people arestill 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 nightsin 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. Whathappens to your line breaks when the room is cold, the light is bad and theaudience is partly dead. Why a church let a queer poetry organisation in. Whatit costs to run a festival the Arts Council turned down and the public paid forinstead.==============================================================THE SCHEDULE==============================================================The crypt is open 10am to 6pm daily. Workshops and the open mic are separatelyticketed. Featured poets open each open mic, two or three a night, before thefloor goes to fourteen.THURSDAY 1 OCTOBER10am Crypt opens · residency begins · set-up and intentions3pm 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 · HFRIDAY 2 OCTOBER10am Crypt opens · residency · podcast recordings6pm Open mic in the crypt Featured: Byuka Makodru · Nols Nathankski · Luigi CoppolaSATURDAY 3 OCTOBER10am Crypt opens · residency · live podcast recordings · Zine Day1pm 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 OCTOBER10am Crypt opens · residency · podcast recordings11am 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 WylieMONDAY 5 OCTOBER10am Crypt opens · closing day · podcast recording · zine assembly11am 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.==============================================================THE WORKSHOPS==============================================================All separately ticketed, all pay what you can, all small. Book individually.PENANCE POETRY WORKSHOPThursday 1 October, 3 to 5pm · and Monday 5 October, 3 to 5pmFacilitated by Nols NathankskiSeven poets produce automatic poetry under deliberately restricted conditions.Over two hours, participants respond to three minute prompts and immediatelyperform their poems to the crypt. Poets are limited to pen, paper and water.Choosing to use a phone, drink alcohol, smoke or otherwise distract oneselfresults in becoming an audience member. None have failed yet. No photography orfilming. Since its inception PENANCE has generated over 200 poems performed bymore than 30 poets.THE SACRED SPACE WITHINThursday 1 October, 3 to 5pmFacilitated by Kristal SisodiaA meditative, poetic, psychedelic journey through sound, body and collectivewriting. Poetry becomes ritual, sound becomes language, and the body becomes aplace to listen. Kristal works with singing, live instruments, loop station,meditation and collective writing, asking where poetry comes from, where itlives in our bodies, and who gets to have access to it. Bring a notebook andcomfortable clothes you can move in. Nothing needs preparing.REDISCOVERING JOY IN A CRYPTFriday 2 October, 11am to 1pmFacilitated by Alice BorderAs light and frothy as you can get running a workshop in a crypt. Expect towrite and discuss poetry that takes your ideas somewhere bizarre, somewherefunny, somewhere surreal, and almost certainly somewhere weird.TRASH FIRE POETRY: WRITING FROM THE ASHESSaturday 3 October, 1 to 3pmFacilitated by Maddy Kilsby-McMurrayA new kind of writing circle, for unblocking your practice. After an initialprompt the poets make a new piece of work. Each is invited to share it, thendestroy it. The scraps are combined and used to make the next pieces. Challengethe limits of inspiration and learn to tease new work from the ashes of what camebefore. Up to 15 writers, all levels.DISASTERPIECESSaturday 3 October, 3 to 5pmFacilitated by Emma KeunThe world is ending, so come and make a disaster piece. Disasterpiece: disasterplus masterpiece, a work so ignominious it gains a cult following. Emma uses theterm against the zeitgeist of disaster and collapse that permeates the 21stcentury. Apocalyptic poetry, made underground. 15 spaces. Dress for a cold tomb,bring a pen and a notebook.PROTEST POETRY: DEFAMILIARISING VIOLENCESunday 4 October, 11am to 1pmFacilitated by Dr Maria CohutTurning anger into poetry, and poetry into an act of protest. What makes a poema protest poem? When violence becomes everyday, banal even, how do we push backagainst that banalisation through the written and spoken word? Maria worksthrough examples from the slam and spoken word scene and from classic andcontemporary page poetry, with guided exercises drawn from Viktor Shklovsky'sconcept of defamiliarisation. Optional sharing. No experience needed.SAYING THE UNSAYABLESunday 4 October, 1 to 3pmSome losses resist language. Grief crouches in the body before it reaches thetongue. An intimate workshop for twelve poets on grief and loss, throughgenerative writing, close reading and honest conversation, with the crypt itselfpart 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 writingblocks, and a closing circle for optional sharing. Group size kept to twelve fordepth and trust.STEVIE'S SCARY STORIES SHARING CIRCLEMonday 5 October, 5 to 7pmFacilitated by Stevie GrantSomething wicked this way comes. A circle, not a class. Bring a scary story: oneyou wrote, one you love, one that has lived rent free in your head sincechildhood. Read aloud in candlelight, shiver together, and talk about what makesa story genuinely frightening and why writers have always been drawn to the dark.No experience necessary. Just bring something that scares you.==============================================================THE TWELVE RESIDENTS==============================================================PIA FAJELAGUTAN (she/her)Better known in the literary shadows as Liethers, or The Piss I Call Art, Pia isan Abu Dhabi-bred word wrangler and left-handed illustrator who turned childhoodscribbles into a full-blown pen name rebellion. By day she hunts talent in theskies, the aviation world's secret poet. By night, or whenever the caffeine isstrong enough, she brews free verse at open mics, prose, and eccentricillustrations that wrestle with identity, wanderlust and the occasionalexistential hangover. She is the author of the delightfully unhinged debutWhiskey For The Uninitiated, five years of identity crises, road dust andself-drawn chaos, and a multilingual poet who firmly believes the best poetrysneaks 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 hasfour honourable mentions from Dark Poets Club and one highly commended fromCreative 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, TateModern, Greenwich Theatre, Koestler Arts, the Cutty Sark and the SouthbankCentre's New Poets Collective. He is a Poetry Archive Worldview winner, Bridportshortlisted, Ledbury and National longlisted, and Lost Souls and Farrago SlamChampion. He makes music as The Only Emperor, and his debut comes from BrokenSleep Books. linktr.ee/PoetryPreacherDR MARIA COHUT (she/they)Maria is a Romanian writer living in Brighton with her ever-growing family ofGiant African Land Snails, Madagascan hissing cockroaches and stick insects. Herwriting is haunted by questions of identity, belonging, displacement, and whatmakes us human. It appears in many online and print publications, including theBorders & Belonging anthology (Cephalopress, 2022), The Hyacinth Review, TheHellebore, and The Other Side of Hope: Journeys in Refugee and ImmigrantLiterature, and has aired on radio. Her first chapbook, Spatter Pattern (backroom poetry, 2023), explored gender-based violence by reimagining detectivefiction tropes. Multiple Exposures (Flight of the Dragonfly, 2026) is her firstfull-length collection, reflecting on becoming uprooted, writing in an adoptedlanguage, and healing fractured identities.MADDY KILSBY-McMURRAY (they/them)Maddy is a non-binary poet and writer involved with a number of local creativeand LGBTQIA+ groups. They are a neurodiversity advocate and regularly host talkssharing their lived experience as an ADHD-er. They volunteer with BCS, working toimprove 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 beenwriting poetry since around 2016 and performing spoken word on the London scenesince 2021, and is a regular at the Word Zoo. She is currently illustrating herdebut book, Dream Weaving, due to be published through Hay House: a collection ofher earlier work, focused on spirituality, reincarnation, grief, the raw natureof love, and finding light in dark places. She is heavily influenced by her latemother Louise Wylie, a renowned psychic medium and spiritual teacher who taughtWriting 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 BettyPress in 2021 and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize in 2022. The bookfuses poetry with satire, surrealism and psychoanalysis, calling on Freud, Artaudand Acker, 4chan and Lana Del Rey, and inviting the reader into the dark cornersof the human psyche.STEVIE GRANT (he/him)Queer Hackney poet, working in the long queer tradition of gothic writing. Hecloses the festival with a sharing circle for stories that frighten, held incandlelight in the crypt. @steviepoemsKRISTAL SISODIA (they/them)Actor and poet. Kristal weaves voice, rhythm and sound together to guide peopleinto a deeper relationship with their words, bodies and stories, working withsinging, live instruments, loop station and meditation. Their practice treatspoetry 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 Againcollective. She has headlined everywhere from Somerset House to the DivineFringe, and her work has been published by WriteLondon, Crunch and Edition. Keypieces include The Unsolicited Shit Pic and An Ode To Billingsgate Fish Market.Her debut pamphlet, Taste Me, is published in October. @alicesayingstuffH (she/her)After years of only writing therapeutically, H mysteriously started writing andperforming poetry in early 2025. She revels in surreal social satire, weavinghumour and sadness, language experiments and characters. She likes to express hertranquilised emotions, and the things she really wishes she had said at the time,to willing audiences. She has been published in three anthologies: Surrey PoetLaureate, Lost Souls, and Forge Press' An Anthology Against Hate. She goes by Hbecause she does not really like her name. Yes, she has a poem about it.@haitch_speaksBYUKA 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 throughcross-medium world-building rooted in social justice, displacement, ancestrality,anti-colonialism, ecology and queerness. Their poetry performance work has beenshared at Ugly Duck, House of Annetta, the Crypt Gallery, QUEERCIRCLE, Ubiskes3in Lithuania and the Fringe Festival in Poland. In 2025 they facilitated workshopson poetry as spellcasting and created a deck of poetry oracles for the BurnedHouse Horizon exhibition at Mimosa House, London. Their current practice explorespsychogeography, deep listening, ritual and writing with ash, using the materialas a portal between the living and the dead, and a channel to the lineages ofwitches, women and marginalised people burned at the stake. They connect topoetry as a tool for liberation and futuring.==============================================================HEADLINE COMMISSION==============================================================NEIL BARTLETT OBEPoet, novelist, theatre director and translator, and one of the defining figuresof British queer culture. His work across four decades has consistentlyinterrogated the relationship between queer history, form, and the body politic.He gives the world premiere of a new commission in St Pancras New Church onSaturday 3 October, surrounded by sixteen queer poets and four musicians. Thechurch is carried on caryatids, stone figures holding the roof up with their ownbodies, so we gave him some of his own.==============================================================COME DOWN==============================================================Hold Space: From the Depths · 1 to 5 October 2026The Crypt Gallery, 165 Euston Road, London NW1 2BAPart of Bloomsbury Festival 2026, its 20th anniversary yearDay ticket to the crypt, 10am to 6pm, pay what you can to £11Workshops, separately ticketed, pay what you canOpen mic every evening, separately ticketedThe Gathering, Saturday 3 October, pay what you can to £10Everything: outsavvy.com/organiser/make-poetry-weird-againACCESSThe crypt is reached by a staircase and there is no step-free access. TheGathering, in the church above, is step free. The crypt is underground and stonebuilt and it is cold. Bring layers. Anything at all, [email protected] and we will be honest with you about what thebuilding can and cannot do.CREDITSMake Poetry Weird Again is made by Nols Nathankski.Recorded live in The Crypt Gallery.@makepoetryweirdagain · [email protected] · 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 episodeRecording naked — what it does to a conversation, and why it belongs to the weird traditionQueer Tongues and the DIY heart of spoken word: the most accessible, affordable art form there isMaking work across languages, forms and the eroticGinsberg, Howl, and poetry as a voice for the underrepresentedBuilding and holding open-mic community in LondonFind ErnestoWebsite: https://www.sarezale.comQueer Tongues (film): https://www.sarezale.com/queer-tongues.htmlTrailer: https://vimeo.com/491771210Open mics in London: http://www.sarezale.com/eventsBook & poems: https://www.sarezale.com/poems.htmlMake 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 @adamdesalleCheck out his open mic here -Events & Activities | Eltham Library | Better LibrariesAdam will be at Hold Space Poetry festival from the 1-5th October 2026.To support the festival please donate at the link belowFUND 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 episodeThe crypt as instrument. What cold brick does to a line before it leaves your mouthWriting with ash, deep listening, poetry as spellcasting, and whether the word ritual is doing any real workMigration and diaspora, two versions of it, held up against each otherThe alter ego as a permission slip. The Piss I Call Art, and what a name lets you sayHoly Week borrowed as scaffolding by people the church would rather not have in the buildingThe prompt that neither of them wanted to answer, and what happened when they did anywayByuka 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-4Epitaph, on the crypt work: asiimovbaker.com/post/epitaphPia 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 + 2Interviewed on Hannah's Bookshelf, North Manchester FM: hannahkate.netMake Poetry Weird Again. Poetry to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. @makepoetryweirdagain · makepoetryweirdagain.com

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 episodeWhat it does to a poem to be written and read below ground — the crypt as instrument, not backdropMigration, 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 thingsHoly Week as a working structure for grief, not just beliefNols 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.htmlSpatter 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 [email protected]@flamencolia.official@the_word_zooMAKE POETRY WEIRD AGAINpoetry to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbedmakepoetryweirdagain.com ·Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/mpwaIf 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 NewingtonThe Octave Marathon (Fundraiser for The Old Church Community Arts Venue in Hackney, London) | Various Artists | Bird RadioNols 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/mikeykirkpatrickMAKE POETRY WEIRD AGAINpoetry to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbedmakepoetryweirdagain.com ·Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/mpwaIf this episode gave you something, consider supporting MPWA so we can keep making it.Subscribe, share, and come find us at an event.