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SPOKEN WORD VERVE CLOSING GALA WITH OPEN MIC Hosted by Sam J Grudgings LOCATION BIRMINGHAM HIPPODROME ABOUT THE EVENT TIME Sunday 4:30pm PRICE £8 / £6 Book Tickets Book Stream WE KNOW how to host a lively, fun and uplifting OPEN MIC event at VERVE! What better way to wrap up the festival that to give everyone a shot at gracing the VERVE stage and letting us hear their best poem? Hosted by Sam J Grudgings, the loudest most nurturing host around and with two massively brilliant feature poets in rising poetry star Courtney Conrad and lively Derby poet Jamie Thrasivoulou, you know this will be an event to remember that just might get you through the year until we're back in Feburary 2026!

WE'VE GOT YOUR SUBMISSION Thank you for applying to WORK IN POETRY at VERVE 2026! We’ll be reviewing submissions over the coming months and aim to get back to all applicants in November. If you have any questions, email us at mail@vervepoetryfestival.com WRITE, CONNECT and GROW in our POETRY WORKSHOPS JOIN OUR SUBSTACK COMMUNITY DISCOVER BOLD, BRILLIANT POETRY IN OUR BOOKSHOP

VERVE OPEN DOOR COMMUNITY We're here for you and want to hear your thoughts on what we provide and how we can support you further. Thank you for being a member of our VERVE POETRY COMMUNITY. First name Last name First of all, do you like what we do? Tell us what and why? What can we do for you? Is there anything VERVE can provide for you in terms of poetry development, opportunities, community support or accessibility? Apart from VERVE, what other community groups are you a member of or associated with? How can we support / help other community groups you're a member of? How would you identify yourself? What's your postcode/location? What's your age group? 16-25 26-35 36-44 46-65 66-75 75+ Email Submit

< Back In this workshop the unsaid takes form and silence speaks volumes. Friday - 1pm SPEAKING THE SILENCES : language of the lacuna Hippodrome Theatre, Hurst Street, Birmingham, UK We will draw inspiration from the unspoken narratives that shape our lives, and write around the lacunas we have learned to carry. What secrets do we haul, whose voices are missing, and what effects does it have on our identities when large cavities form in our histories? ABOUT THE POET Scarlett Ward is the Staffordshire poet laureate 2024-2026. Her debut collection ‘Ache’ was released by Verve Press in 2019, and she went on to be a finalist for the women’s poets prize by the Rebecca Swift foundation. As well as performing at Derby Literature Festival and Verve Festival, her poetry can be found in Nine Arches, 21 poems and Broken Sleep anthologies. WORKSHOP £16 / £12 Friday - 1pm Book Tickets

WORKSHOP FINDING MARY: IRISH ANCESTRY Helen Calcutt LOCATION BIRMINGHAM HIPPODROME ABOUT THE EVENT TIME Saturday - 2:30pm PRICE £24.50 / £18.50 Book Tickets This imaginative poetry workshop invites writers to explore the landscapes, places, and people that call to them. Drawing on Helen’s own poem, ‘Visiting Mary’, which details her Irish ancestry, we will identify and creatively excavate those, as-of-yet, unmet spaces and faces that we long to journey into and understand. Through the magic of language and the mind, writers will immerse themselves in this experience, and in parallel, observe the shape and terrain of their inner worlds, and why this soulful part of us seeks connection with these external spaces. Poets are encouraged to come lightly prepared with a few ideas around familial history, but this isn’t essential. ABOUT THE POET HELEN Calcutt is a choreographer, dance aritst, and award-winning poet. Her pamphlet ‘Somehow’ (Verve Poetry Press, 2020), was a PBS Winter Bulletin Pamphlet & Poetry School Book of the Year (2020). Her anthology ‘Eighty-Four’ (Verve Press, 2019), was a Saboteur Award shortlist, and a Poetry Wales Book of the Year, 2019. Her full-length collection ‘Feeling All the Kills’, a verse account of assault, and recovery, was published by Pavilion Poetry, April 2024. Her notable research into text-to-dance translation has been supported by Arts Council England, the Birmingham REP Theatre, and One Dance U.K. She has received awards from the Society of Authors, and her writing appears in the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Poetry Ireland, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, Wild Court, and MPT Magazine, amongst others. Helen was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Loughborough University for her outstanding contribution to the arts in 2023. She is currently creating and touring a dance adaptation of Max Porter’s ‘Grief Is the Thing with Feathers’ with her company Beyond Words.

< Back Write a poem on a moment of change in your own or someone else’s life. Saturday - 3pm THE SWERVE Hippodrome Theatre, Hurst Street, Birmingham, UK The point of this is to emerge with a poem about change which also embodies change. 1. Start out in sections or fragments and see how it goes. 2. Maybe look at other sequence /fragment poems like Wallace Stevens’ ‘Thirteen ways of looking at a Blackbird’ Warsan Shire’s ‘The House’ Robert Hass’s ‘Lines on Last Spring’ or (a really important poem of his, on his relations with his alcoholic mum as a child but also on love sex and evolution) Dragonflies Mating. These unfold in numbered sections, watch how they tell a story or stories, how the perspective might shift from one section to the next, how voice or speaker, length, shape or tone of each section vary. 3. Once you have a sequence of fragments, lay around with losing some, melding them together into one, reversing them... Maybe they done want to go into one - which is fine. ABOUT THE POET Ruth Padel is a writer of unusual range. She has close personal links to Greece, India, classical music, nature, wildlife conservation and science, but is first and foremost an award-winning poet. Her books include thirteen acclaimed poetry collections, two novels, and a wide sweep of non-fiction. She lives in London, is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, and currently Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Magdalene College Cambridge. WORKSHOP £24.50 / £18.50 Saturday - 3pm Book Tickets

WORKSHOP SPEAKING THE SILENCES : language of the lacuna Scarlett Ward LOCATION BIRMINGHAM HIPPODROME ABOUT THE EVENT TIME Friday - 1pm PRICE £16 / £12 Book Tickets In this workshop the unsaid takes form and silence speaks volumes. We will draw inspiration from the unspoken narratives that shape our lives, and write around the lacunas we have learned to carry. What secrets do we haul, whose voices are missing, and what effects does it have on our identities when large cavities form in our histories? ABOUT THE POET Scarlett Ward is the Staffordshire poet laureate 2024-2026. Her debut collection ‘Ache’ was released by Verve Press in 2019, and she went on to be a finalist for the women’s poets prize by the Rebecca Swift foundation. As well as performing at Derby Literature Festival and Verve Festival, her poetry can be found in Nine Arches, 21 poems and Broken Sleep anthologies.

WORKSHOP LYRIC SHAME Susannah Dickey LOCATION BIRMINGHAM HIPPODROME ABOUT THE EVENT TIME Friday - 3:30pm PRICE £24.50 / £18.50 Book Tickets Shame has always had the potential to shape the lyric tradition, to produce poems more ambitious and daring for their uncertainty of self. “My hunch is that there’s something about working in poetry (above all in lyric writing) which is inherently bound up with shame. Indeed, shame may act as a driving ‘motor’ of lyric.” Denise Riley Over the course of the 20th century, lyric poetry underwent a kind of crisis of identity, sparked by the American academy’s incremental disdain for what were termed ‘epiphany poems’. As a consequence of this scathing diagnosis, much lyric poetry became more self-aware, more self-critical, more ashamed of itself. That said, for those poets who have spent their careers writing on the fringes, shame was not a new feature, for shame has always had the potential to shape the lyric tradition, to produce poems more ambitious and daring for their uncertainty of self. At a historical moment in which we have much to feel ashamed of, it is vital that poetry reflect the messy contradictions of existence. In this workshop, writers will read and discuss some of the poems most emblematic of the lyric shame movement, including work by Sylvia Plath, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, and Robert Hass. There will also be writing exercises designed to harness negative affect in ways that can render the resulting poems more powerful.

POETRY SATURDAY NIGHT HEADLINE EVENT Theresa Lola, Victoria Kennefick, Anthony Vahni Capildeo with host Jo Bell LOCATION BIRMINGHAM HIPPODROME ABOUT THE EVENT TIME Saturday - 6pm PRICE £10 / £8 Book Tickets Book Stream Three incredible poets, all giants in their way on the contemporary UK and world poetry scene. We’re thrilled to have Anthony Vahni Capildeo back with us reading from her brilliant recent collection, Polkadot Wounds (Carcanet, 2024). Joining Anthony are Victoria Kennefick and Theresa Lola . This is incredibly Victoria's first time at VERVE. Her most recent publication, Egg/Shell (Carcanet, 2024) is the Poetry Bok Society Spring Choice 2024. Theresa joins us to celebrate publication of her second full collection, Ceremony for the Nameless (Penguin, 2024) Hosting these three amazing poets for readings and discussion is Jo Bell, renowned poet and co-author of How to be a Poet (Nine Arches Press, 2017).

WORKSHOP A FAMILY AFFAIR Victoria Kennefick LOCATION BIRMINGHAM HIPPODROME ABOUT THE EVENT TIME Sunday - 12:30pm PRICE £24.50 / £18.50 Book Tickets Write poems that speak to the most formative relationship we will ever experience. In this generative poetry workshop we’ll explore and interrogate what family, and our subsequent attachment styles, might mean for us in our poems. How can we use this relationship to expand our understanding of communal and individual experiences? What unique and formative language did we learn from our family of origin that we can employ in our work? In this workshop we’ll read and study a wide range of poems from traditional and contemporary poets around this subject and write poems that speak to the most formative relationship we will ever experience. ABOUT THE POET Victoria Kennefick is a poet, writer and teacher from Shanagarry, Co. Cork now based in Co. Kerry. Her first collection, Eat or We Both Starve , was published by Carcanet Press in March 2021. It won the Seamus Heaney Prize for Best First Collection 2022 and The Dalkey Literary Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award 2022. It was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, The Costa Poetry Book Award, The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and The Butler Literary Prize. It was a a Book of the Year in The Guardian , T he Irish Times , The Sunday Independent and The White Review , and was also selected as one of The Telegraph 's Best Poetry Books to Buy 2021. Her pamphlet, White Whale (Southword Editions, 2015), won the Munster Literature Centre Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition and the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Poetry Review, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Poetry News, Prelude, Copper Nickel, The Irish Times, Ambit, bath magg, Banshee, Bad Lilies, PBLJ and elsewhere. She won the 2013 Red Line Book Festival Poetry Prize and many of her poems have also been anthologised and broadcast on national radio stations.

VERVE POEM OF THE MONTH SUBMISSION FORM First name* Last name* Email* Phone Please provide proof of payment Upload This could be a receipt from your payment provider, or a subscription confirmation. If you cannot upload proof, please provide here how you paid with receipt id or confirmation code. How Many Poems* 1 Poem 2 Poems 3 Poems Poem Upload* Upload Poems If you are sending more than 1 poem, please seperate them into individual doc.x or PDF files. If you upload three poems in one file, it creates more admin. I confirm this is my original work and not generated by AI. * Anything else you’d like us to know? Tick this box if you would like to stay updated on POTM. If you unsubscribe, we cannot send you emails regarding POTM from our system. * Tick this box if you would like to receive newsletters from Verve Poetry Festival. Tick this box if you would like to receive newsletters from Verve Poetry Press. Submit

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