MAKE POETRY WEIRD AGAIN

HOW TO MAKE POETRY ON A RAFT IN LONDON

How to Make Poetry on a Raft in London, with Chiara Ambrosio Recorded 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/raftparlourmoon The film, and the Raft radio archive: https://raftalondonstory.com/ Chiara Ambrosio: http://acuriousroom.com/ENTER.html Mentioned: 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 Berger Chapters 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

HOW TO MAKE POETRY FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL

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 book Derek Jarman, Kicking the Pricks: The Last of England (Prototype Publishing, 2026), with new poems by Richard Scott https://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.com Richard Scott Richard 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-scott Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage, Dungeness Where MPWA is headed in autumn 2027. https://creativefolkestone.org.uk/prospect-cottage Also honorably mentioned Jarman’s films Imagining October, The Last of England and Blue · Angus Irvine’s show at the Crypt Gallery Coming up 11 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 | OutSavvy 7 December: Proper Poetry with R.O. Dodgson, MPWA’s last event of the year Get in touch Send poems, episode ideas and responses to nols@makepoetryweirdagain.com Make poems.

HOW TO MAKE A POETRY FESTIVAL FROM THE DEPTHS

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. ============================================================== THE SCHEDULE ============================================================== 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. ============================================================== THE WORKSHOPS ============================================================== 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. ============================================================== THE TWELVE RESIDENTS ============================================================== 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. ============================================================== HEADLINE COMMISSION ============================================================== 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. ============================================================== COME DOWN ============================================================== 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 nols@makepoetryweirdagain.com 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 · nols@makepoetryweirdagain.com TAGS poetry · spoken word · queer · london · poetry festival · crypt · bloomsbury festival · neil bartlett · open mic · zine · workshops · make poetry weird again

HOW TO MAKE POEMS ON A PODCAST NAKED

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.

HOW TO TAKE POETRY FROM THE LIBRARY TO THE CASTLE

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

HOW TO MAKE CRYPTOLOGICAL POEMS FOR THE UNINITIATED

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

HOW TO MAKE QUEER POETRY FOR 88 YEARS

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.

• Chapters

HOW TO MAKE POEMS WITH KRAZY EYES & NO BELIEF

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

HOW TO FIND DIVINITY IN LUST AT THE OPEN MIC

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.

HOW TO SAVE AN OLD CHURCH WITH AN OCTAVE

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.

HOW TO MAKE POEMS WHEN NO ONE KNOWS WHERE YOU COME FROM

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

HOW TO MAKE CHAOTIC GNARLEY PROJECTIONS FUNNY

Nols Nathankski and H Phillips sit down to make poems in the crypt during HOLD SPACE poetry festival. H is a London based queer and silly poet. H began her open mic journey by doing a poetry for performance course @citylit. H talks from grief through objects and absurdity. A resident at Hold Space festival. H displayed poetry on the walls of the crypt and can be found headlining at the Hold Space Open Mic on the 31st May 2026 at HWK in Hackney Wick. Follow her @haitch_speaks Nols and H make poems with prompts from the Hold Space prompt sheet. H shouts out @everythingpoetry @wordspacepoems 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

HOW TO MAKE POEMS OUT OF QUEER FAILURE

Nols takes a register of ten artists, poets, and authors who were told by courts, critics, markets, and silence that they had failed. They had not failed. This is their work. Read it. Look at it. Go toward it. Nols improvises ten poems in response to their stories and encourages you to do the same. Send your responses to nols@makepoetryweirdagain.com prompts below provide list of prompts in one sentence Markievicz Write about a love you were not allowed to name in public. Cahun Write about a self you constructed deliberately. Hall Write the first page of the book that would have saved twelve-year-old you. Turing Write about what it costs to be useful to people who do not love you. Arenas Write about something you made in secret. Blake Write about making something with your hands when the official channels were closed to you. Kafka Write about a system you are inside of. Van Gogh Write a letter to the one person who believed in you when no one else did. Akutagawa Write about a vague anxiety about your future. Angelou Write about a defeat you survived. 01 CONSTANCE MARKIEVICZ 1868–1927 · Revolutionary, painter, poet Her prison letters — written on single sheets in tiny handwriting, incorporating drawings and poems — are the primary document of her interior life. → Prison Letters of Countess Markievicz — Internet Archive (free) https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.176226 → Her political writings — Marxists Internet Archive https://www.marxists.org/archive/markievicz/index.htm → W.B. Yeats: "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43279/in-memory-of-eva-gore-booth-and-con-markiewicz Eva Gore-Booth, her sister and lifelong love, was also a poet and radical. Her collected poems are harder to find online — seek them out. 02 CLAUDE CAHUN 1894–1954 · Surrealist artist, photographer, resistance fighter The largest collection of her photographs and archive material is held by Jersey Heritage and is fully free to browse online — the best place to start. → Jersey Heritage — full Cahun & Moore collection (free) https://catalogue.jerseyheritage.org/claude-cahun/ → MoMA — six works online https://www.moma.org/collection/works/83692 → Getty Museum collection https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/104PH8 → Metropolitan Museum — 56 results including Aveux non Avenus https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search?q=Claude+Cahun Her written work — Aveux non Avenus (Disavowals) — is harder to find in English translation. The Met has the 1930 original in their collection. 03 RADCLYFFE HALL 1880–1943 · Author of The Well of Loneliness The Well of Loneliness (1928) is now in the public domain in the US and freely available in multiple formats. Read it. → The Well of Loneliness — Project Gutenberg (free) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/73042 → Standard Ebooks edition — clean free epub/mobi https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/radclyffe-hall/the-well-of-loneliness → LibriVox audiobook (free) https://librivox.org/the-well-of-loneliness-by-radclyffe-hall/ The obscenity trial transcript is worth reading alongside the novel — the gap between what the judge said and what the book actually contains tells you everything. 04 ALAN TURING 1912–1954 · Mathematician, codebreaker, father of computing The Turing Digital Archive at King's College Cambridge holds nearly 3,000 images of his letters, papers, photographs, and unpublished manuscripts — free online. → The Turing Digital Archive — King's College Cambridge (free) https://turingarchive.kings.cam.ac.uk/ → AlanTuring.net — virtual archive of computing history documents https://www.alanturing.net/ → His 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers" — the foundation of computing https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf Andrew Hodges's biography Alan Turing: The Enigma is the definitive account and is available in most libraries. The film The Imitation Game is a simplified version — read the book. 05 REINALDO ARENAS 1943–1990 · Cuban novelist, poet, exile Before Night Falls, his memoir, is the essential starting point. It is not in the public domain but is widely available. The film adaptation by Julian Schnabel (2000) is also excellent. → Before Night Falls — Open Library (borrow free with account) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1740458M/Before_night_falls → Wikipedia overview with bibliography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinaldo_Arenas His Pentagonia — five novels including Singing from the Well, The Palace of the White Skunks, Farewell to the Sea, The Color of Summer, and The Assault — is his major work. Most are available from Penguin. His suicide note is one of the most important documents in queer literary history. It ends: Cuba will be free. I already am. 06 WILLIAM BLAKE 1757–1827 · Poet, engraver, visionary The William Blake Archive is the gold standard — facsimiles of his illuminated books as he made them, hand-coloured, in high resolution. This is how the work was meant to be seen. → The William Blake Archive — illuminated books in facsimile (free) https://www.blakearchive.org/ → Poetry Foundation — poems and extensive commentary (free) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-blake → Songs of Innocence and Experience — Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1934 → The Marriage of Heaven and Hell — Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45315 Start with Songs of Innocence and Experience, then The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The prophetic books (Jerusalem, Milton) are for later — they require some time to enter. Blake is buried at Bunhill Fields, Islington — a short walk from Canonbury. His grave is marked and visitable. 07 FRANZ KAFKA 1883–1924 · Prague, insurance, "burn everything" His three novels and most of his short stories are freely available online. Start with The Trial. Then Letter to His Father, which he also never sent. → The Trial — Project Gutenberg (free) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7849/7849-h/7849-h.htm → The Metamorphosis — Project Gutenberg (free) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5200 → In the Penal Colony — Project Gutenberg (free) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1195 → The Castle — Project Gutenberg (free) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18027 Letter to His Father (Brief an den Vater, 1919) — written but never sent to his father — is one of the most devastating documents of family, failure, and self-analysis ever written. Find it in any Kafka collected works. His diaries, edited by Max Brod, are equally essential. The entry where he writes about wanting to destroy everything is worth reading alongside the novels. 08 VINCENT VAN GOGH 1853–1890 · One painting sold The complete letters to Theo — over 800 of them — are freely available online in the scholarly Van Gogh Letters edition. They are among the greatest pieces of writing in the history of art. → vangoghletters.org — complete letters, searchable, free https://vangoghletters.org/ → Letters of a Post-Impressionist — Project Gutenberg (free)https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40393 → Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam — collection online https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection The letter where he writes "I cannot help it that my pictures do not sell. Nevertheless the time will come when people will see that they are worth more than the price of the paint" is Letter 686, July 1888. He painted the Starry Night, the Irises, and the Wheat Field with Crows while living in an asylum. The Van Gogh Museum has high-resolution images of all of them free online. 09 RYŪNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA 1892–1927 · Father of the Japanese short story Rashomon and In a Grove are the gateway — short, brilliant, structurally perfect. Cogwheels, his final hallucinatory work, is the one to read last. → Rashomon — Project Gutenberg (free) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1982 → Rashomon and Other Stories — Internet Archive (borrow free) https://archive.org/details/rashomonothersto00akut → The Essential Akutagawa inc. Cogwheels and A Fool's Life — Internet Archivehttps://archive.org/details/essentialakutaga0000akut Cogwheels (Haguruma, 1927) — written in the final year of his life, published posthumously — is his masterpiece. A first-person account of breakdown, cogwheels at the edge of vision, the sense of being ground through a system. Read it last. Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), adapted from In a Grove and the Rashomon story, is freely available on various streaming services and is itself a masterwork. 010 MAYA ANGELOU 1928–2014 · Defeat after defeat after defeat. Still. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) is her memoir and her masterpiece. Still I Rise is the poem. Both are worth your time today. → Still I Rise — Poetry Foundation (free) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46446/still-i-rise → Maya Angelou — Poetry Foundation full archive (free) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/maya-angelou → On the Pulse of Morning — 1993 inauguration poem (free, YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59zGMWH3K5I → I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — Open Library (borrow free) https://openlibrary.org/works/OL472609W/I_Know_Why_the_Caged_Bird_Sings Her autobiography runs to six volumes. The first three — Caged Bird, Gather Together in My Name, and Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas — are the ones to read in order. She did not publish her first book until she was 41. James Baldwin told her at a dinner party in 1968 that she was a poet. She had been a poet her whole life. 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.

HOW TO MAKE POEMS THAT DELVE INTO THE SUBLIME

Nols Nathankski delves into the sublime with Molly O'Leary Molly May O’Leary is an interdisciplinary performer. Her art has always and already been from/for the body but she has recently been approaching its rebellious and growing multi-dextrous power more directly… with ever-increasing glee and ever-evolving results. follow her on @mollymayinsta for developments The pair discuss philosophy, depression and the arts in ireland. They make (and dont make!) poems from prompts by Adam RW of storytime and from the crypt. This episode was recorded online in March 2026 after Nol's planned trip to Dublin was cancelled. Check out Molly's work here; https://mollymayoleary.bandcamp.com/ 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

HOW TO BUILD COMMUNITY WITH POETRY

Nols Nathankski talks community with Dean Atta on the podcast! Dean Atta is a BAFTA-winning British poet, author and filmmaker, current chair of the Society of Authors Poetry and Spoken Word Group. Of Greek Cypriot and Jamaican heritage, Dean was named one of the 100 most influential LGBTQ+ people in the UK. He’s been commissioned by Tate Britain, Tate Modern, the National Portrait Gallery and Keats House. His novel in verse, The Black Flamingo, won the Stonewall Book Award. His memoir Person Unlimited was published by Canongate in 2024. His short film, Two Black Boys in Paradise, won the 2026 BAFTA Film Award for British Short Animation. In this episode, Dean talks about his forthcoming collection "I Don’t March to That Drum", reads two exclusive poems written in a Joelle Taylor workshop, and discusses making work with soundscapes alongside Antosh Wojcik. He reflects on his time with Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, the Roundhouse Collective, and his residency at Keats House, and speaks to the importance of open mics and workshops for sharing and developing your writing. Nols and Dean make poems live, using a prompt Dean created on the train as well as prompts from 48 Writing Prompts, out now on Burley Fisher Community Press. Dean is chair of the Society of Authors Poetry and Spoken Word Group. https://societyofauthors.org/groups/poetry-spoken-word/ Dean’s books • I Am Nobody’s Nigger - The Westbourne Press • The Black Flamingo - Hachette Children’s Group • Only On The Weekends - Hachette Children’s Group • I Can’t Even Think Straight - Hachette Children’s Group • There is (still) love here - Nine Arches Press • Person Unlimited: An Ode to My Black Queer Body - Canongate Books • Confetti (illustrated by Alea Marley) - Orchard Books • Auntie’s Bangles (illustrated by Alea Marley) - Orchard Books Dean’s film • Two Black Boys in Paradise, an animated short film, winner of the 2026 BAFTA Film Award for Best British Short Animation https://www.channel4.com/programmes/two-black-boys-in-paradise mentioned in this episode • joelle taylor — poet, playwright, ts eliot prize winner, founder of slambassadors, host of out-spoken at the southbank centre • antosh wojcik — poet, sound artist, drummer; one half of post everything; how to keep time: a drum solo for dementia produced by penned in the margins • malika’s poetry kitchen — collective founded by malika booker; dean is a longstanding member • keith jarrett — poet, former uk slam champion; new collection hide me under the blood and i shall be satisfied (bad betty press) is a pbs spring 2026 recommendation — dean and keith both came up through goldsmiths’ spoken word educators programme together writing prompts • 48 writing prompts — riso-printed a6 booklet, published by burley fisher community press, out now

HOW TO IMPROVISE A POETRY WORKSHOP

Nols Nathankski introduces the Make Poetry Weird Again series of summer workshops raising money for HOLD SPACE POETRY FESTIVAL 1-5th October 2026 as part of the Bloomsbury Festival. Nols takes listeners through how he designed the workshops and how you can do them all too wherever you a re either solo or preferably with some other poets and friends. PENANCE POETRY WORKSHOP monthly / Make Poetry Weird Again Studio, Grosvenor Avenue, N5 / pay what you can Penance is the one that started it all. A monthly automatic writing workshop held in the MPWA studio in North London — three hours, pen and paper only, no phones, no booze, no editing. Each session runs on timed prompts: three minutes to write, then you read it to the room. No exceptions. Over 200 poems have been written in Penance sessions by more than 30 poets. It has become a small, intense corner of the London poetry scene — radical, confessional, sometimes surprising even to the people writing it. The workshop is soundtracked by the Longplayer, a piece of music designed to play for a thousand years without repeating. That's the vibe. Upcoming dates: 30 May, 27 June, 25 July, 29 August, 26 September, 31 October, 28 November, 12 December 2026 — all at 1pm. Access note: four flights of stairs, handrails provided. More accessible sessions planned. Book at outsavvy.com — search Penance Poetry Workshop. Pay what you can, minimum £1. PENANCE: THE LONG DAY monthly / Canonbury, N1 (exact address on booking) / £33 / unwaged pay what you can / strictly 7 places This is the escalation. Seven hours. Twenty-one prompts minimum. A living room in Canonbury. Food provided. Notebooks and pens provided. You bring yourself, as you actually are. The premise: what happens when you automatically write and perform for seven hours? Nols's working theory is that the first hour is still performance — you're managing yourself, deciding what you will and won't let onto the page. By hour three that falls away. By hour seven you're writing from somewhere else entirely. This is endurance art. It is not a craft workshop. There is no feedback, no workshopping, no critique. It is an act of excavation. Full refunds available to anyone who cannot face it the night before. That policy is part of the work. Upcoming dates: 23 May, 20 June, 25 July, 22 August, 19 September, 17 October, 21 November 2026 — all 1pm to 8pm. Book at outsavvy.com — search Penance The Long Day. £33 general / pay what you can unwaged. INTERTAINMENT — FREE PLAY WORKSHOP 1st & 3rd Sunday monthly / HWK London, 29 White Post Lane, E9 5EN / pay what you can The newest programme. We meet in the HWK courtyard at 2pm. You get a task card scored writing prompts in the Oulipo tradition, invitations rather than rules. The group decides which way to walk. We wander the canal, the estates, the parkland, wherever. Silent writing in the field for two hours. Back at 4.30 for an optional share / read something, name one thing that surprised you. Then pizza. Inspired by Stephen Nachmanovitch's Free Play Free Play: Improvisation in Life & Artthe idea that improvisation is a spiritual practice, not a skill to develop. Deliberately mixed poets, performers, complete beginners. The mix is the material. No experience required. Genuinely. Next date: Sunday 10 May 2026, 2pm–5pm. Only 8 tickets left at time of recording. Full accessibility: step-free, wheelchair accessible, accessible toilets, quiet space. Route chosen on the day with access needs in mind. Book at outsavvy.com — search Intertainment Free Play Workshop. Pay what you can, minimum £1. Links Penance Poetry Workshop — outsavvy.com/event/33964/penance-poetry-workshop Penance: The Long Day — outsavvy.com/event/35191/penance-the-long-day Intertainment — outsavvy.com/event/35674/intertainment-free-play-workshop All MPWA events — outsavvy.com/organiser/make-poetry-weird-again makepoetryweirdagain.com / @makepoetryweirdagain

HOW TO MAKE POEMS IN A CRYPT TO FEEL ALIVE AGAIN

Nols sits down in the crypt in february with Hebah Aboud and Cassie with a special feature from Richie Bliss of Ava' Word. Hebah Aboud is a poet, writer and community organiser. She runs poetry events in Rome and London. Check out @ancharnia for her poetry events. Cassie is a writer, art consultant and creative director from London @ceceqt Rich Bliss is a poet and open mic host from London checkout @richblisswords and @avawordpoetry This episode is from the original residency @thecryptgallerylondon in february 2026 before the first Hold Space Festival in April. We are back at the crypt gallery for our next residency and festival 1-6th October 2026. Unlike other podcast episodes this is a long conversation about all areas of life, faith and pain. Poetry gets in through the cracks. Being a field recording the editing has been difficult and the atmospheric sounds of the crypt seeps in. See tickets below to our next festival HOLD SPACE POETRY FESTIVAL OPENING CEREMONY Tickets, Thursday 1 October • 7 PM - 9 PM | Eventbrite HOLD SPACE POETRY FESTIVAL DAY TICKET Tickets | Multiple Dates @ Crypt Gallery, London | Pay What You Can to £11 | OutSavvy We are fundraising for the festival with the below open mics HOLD SPACE: OPEN MIC Tickets | Multiple Dates @ HWK LONDON, London | Pay What You Can | OutSavvy

HOW TO MAKE POEMS HEART WISDOM KNOWS

Nols sits down in HWK in Hackney Wick to speak to MIKE the beautiful soul that has allowed MPWA to take up residence in their venue over the summer for the HOLD SPACE POETRY FESTIVAL FUNDRAISER OPEN MICS (see link below for tickets) mike runs HWK, a venue in hackney wick and the home of hold space open mic nights through summer 2026. he talks to nols about what it takes to run a space that holds poetry the logistics, the losses, and the unexpected joys. they get into wedding poems: why people want them, and what it means to write something true for someone else’s most public moment. and they talk about the poetry of running a venue the rhythms, the silences, the crowd energy that doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet. HWK is a third space, cafe, bar, venue and courtyard and our summer residence. The pizza is great too. www.hwklondon.com hold space open mic starts on the 13th May 2026 6-9pm tickets below. bi-weekly at hwk, hackney wick, through summer 2026. free to attend. all welcome. find out more and grab your spot →HOLD SPACE: OPEN MIC Tickets | Multiple Dates @ HWK LONDON, London | Pay What You Can | OutSavvy

HOW TO ACHE FOR TRANSCENDENCE IN A FAILSPACE

Nols Nathankski gets spiritual with Chloe Smith a South Londoner who fell in love with reading and words 8 years old by reading the magical far away tree. Chloe then discovered poetry through substitute teachers at school. She was published as a young writer in primary school. As a teenager she navigated hormones and layers of identity through journaling, leaning towards song lyrics, leaving poetry alone. It was only hitting 30 when she revisited poetry and braved the open mic scene. Curating her own night in Croydon (@skibabble, which is on a hiatus) putting together day festivals and holding safe spaces for the community to express and progress. Chloe is a spiritual seed, who loves the art of good questions and longs to press through the veil of what is known to comprehend the great familial unknown. Chloe and Nols make poems with prompts from Adam RW of Storytime London. Get Chloe's book here; https://www.londonpoetrybooks.com/?s=Small+pockets+of+mischief

HOW TO SPIT POETRY IN FRONT OF 1500 PEOPLE

Fresh from our Hold Space Poetry Festival in the Crypt Gallery @nolsnathankski was given tickets for @spitnights biggest ever show @theroundhouse in Camden by his friend the sensational poet Hebah Aboud. @hebah_a Nols decided to make some guerrilla radio by gauging audience reactions to a sell out night of spoken word & improv jazz in front of 1500 in a legendary venue. The response from the crowd was overwhelmingly positive, but the night was a bit too big and loud for Nol's tiny neurodivergent brain and this episode also celebrates the peace that comes from smaller and quieter spaces. The night was headlined by superstar poets @georgiejones @maureenonuwali @caitlinoryan and @harrybaker - who it turns out Nols weirdly went to school with, something he obviously couldn't stop telling bemused interviewees. This episode is a series of chaotic field recordings interviewing members of the audience and staff at the roundhouse who nols forgot to make notes of the insta handles of- please tag yourselves! Friend of the show @that1thea makes an appearance! Nols did get 3 poems from a SUPER SPECIAL GUEST POET at the end of the night - live outside the Roundhouse! Listen until the end to find out who it was... Prompt: Write a poem to perform in front of 1500 people. To support Hold Space Poetry Festival's return in October and keep it Free entry please come to one of our pay-what-you-can fundraiser open mic nights at HWK throughout summer! HOLD SPACE: OPEN MIC Tickets | Multiple Dates @ HWK LONDON, London | Pay What You Can | OutSavvy @makepoetryweirdagain www.makepoetryweirdagain.com