Birmingham’s very own Verve Festival of Poetry and Spoken Word returns to Birmingham Hippodrome!
Now in its fifth year, Verve has become synonymous with a lively and celebratory approach to programming poetry of every different kind.
Whether it be raucous performance poetry events, quiet reading events, studious workshops, mind-blowing dramatic poetry, collaborative work or open mic poetry – the programme encourages audiences to see their favourite poets and to try something new – to join in, create, listen and learn.
Whether new to poetry or an old hand, there’s something for everyone to enjoy at VERVE!
There are three types of pass available for the festival.
Festival Pass
Includes entry to all events throughout the festival (excluding workshops and podium events).
£40 (concessions £30)
Saturday Pass
Includes entry to all events on Sat 19 Feb (excluding workshops and podium events).
£25 (concessions £18.50)
Sunday Pass
Includes entry to all events on Sun 20 Feb (excluding workshops and podium events).
£20 (concessions £15)
Concession tickets are available to senior citizens, school pupils, students, people registered as disabled or unemployed.
Verve Birmingham Schools Slam Final
Wed 16 Feb, 7 – 9pm, Patrick Studio
Opening Verve 2022 is our first Birmingham Schools Slam Final!
We invited twelve local Primary Schools to bring a team of their best poets to this exciting new competition hosted and facilitated by Brummie gem and Verve Poetry Press poet Giovanni ‘Spoz’ Esposito! But there’s more! Our judges will consist of three Young Poet Laureates from the area: Fatma Mohiuddin (Birmingham), Erin Gascoigne-Jones (Staffordshire) and Faith Taylor (Worcestershire) selected and encouraged by regional poetry champions Poetry On Loan. Each laureate will also deliver a set of their work. Come and support the poetry stars of the future through their first ever slam!
In association with Poetry On Loan.
Tickets £5
Dancing to Music You Hate – and other poets and poems
Thu 17 Feb, 7.30 – 10pm, Patrick Studio
Poetry. Beatbox. Celtic dubstep.
Dancing To Music you Hate is Jasmine Gardosi’s debut show about gender identity, coming to terms with queerness, and finding the words. Prepare for an hour of explosive dubstep bass-lines and soaring folk violin which blow apart the boundaries of gender and musical genre alike. Watch Jasmine converse, argue and compete with a live band of instrumentalists as she cracks open the binary with boldness, humour and celebration.
Joining her are Alternative Dubstep Orchestra’s Damo Wilding and DJ C@ in the H@, trumpeter/techno artist Sam Wooster and Ire-Ish’s multi-instrumentalist Jobe Baker-Sullivan. The show also features BBC Young Jazz Musician 2018 saxophonist Xhosa Cole.
The first half of the night includes a musical open mic along with special guest poets Luke Kennard and Jonathan Bernard and hosted by Jasmine.
Originally commissioned by Warwick Arts Centre.
With Support of Birmingham City University.
Tickets £6.50 (concessions £4.50)
Concession tickets are available to senior citizens, school pupils, students, people registered as disabled or unemployed.
Performing Your Poetry with Jasmine Gardosi
Fri 18 Feb, 3.30 – 5.30pm, Gowling
Participants will be invited to explore unique ways of structured storytelling that not only contemplates the narrative of the Universe, but also considers the influence of breath, shape, pulse, and sensation upon the page. All levels of experience welcome!
Tickets £16.50 (concessions £12.50)
Suhaiymah Mazoor-Khan Workshop: Writing as Resistance
Fri 18 Feb, 4 – 6pm, Lloyds
Join Suhaiymah in a workshop where we will consider the power of writing as resistance. In this time of worldwide violence and oppression as the consequences of capitalism, racism, misogyny, militarism, hostile environments and more, resistance feels urgent and necessary, but it can also be difficult and overwhelming to know where to start. In this workshop we will explore writing as a medium of disrupting elite discourses; imagining alternatives worlds; and in making space for us to define ourselves for ourselves, instead of being “crunched into other people’s fantasies” of us (Audre Lorde).
Tickets £16.50 (concessions £12.50)
Nina Mingya Powles, Jack Underwood, Phoebe Stuckes with host, Emma Wright from Birmingham’s Emma Press
Fri 18 Feb, 6.30 – 8pm, Patrick Studio
Our regular Friday Evening poetry headline event features three incredible contemporary UK poets.
Nina Mingya Powles debut collection, Magnolia (Nine Arches Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Book of Poetry in 2020. Phoebe Stuckes, four times winner of the Foyles Young Poets Award, released her debut collection, Platinum Blonde, in 2020 with Bloodaxe. Jackk Underwood followed up his debut collection, Happiness (Faber, 2015) with a follow-up in 2021 called A Year In The New Life, which has been short-listed for the TS Eliot Prize. Hosting these three wonderful poets for readings and discussion is Emma Dai’an Wright, publisher and founder of Birmingham based indie The Emma Press.
With Support of University of Birmingham
Tickets £6.50 (concessions £4.50)
Pen-Ting VERVE Special feat: Suhaiymah Manzoor Khan & Otis Mensah and hosted by The Repeat Beat Poet
Fri 18 Feb, 8.30 – 10.30pm, Patrick Studio
The UK’s freshest Hip Hop & Poetry open mic night is coming to Birmingham!
Join us as Pen-Ting bring you the best of UK-based poetry and Hip Hop, with vibes higher than London rent, and tastier bars than the Cadbury factory, all wrapped up in a night that’s committed to combatting harmful social narratives by platforming Black and marginalised voices. It’s Hip Hop, politics, poetry and speaking truth to power. Good vibes included.
Tickets £6.50 (concessions £4.50)
Concession tickets are available to senior citizens, school pupils, students, people registered as disabled or unemployed.
Liz Berry Workshop: The Poetry of Amulets
Sat 19 Feb, 9.30 – 11.30am, Gowling
“To love is the great amulet that makes this world a garden.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
How might we use poems – those we love and those we write – to make charms and amulets to guide and protect us? Join poet Liz Berry to read, write and use craft (of all kinds!) to create your own poetic charms.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £16.50)
Natalie Linh Bolderston Workshop: Fragmentation and Reconstruction
Sat 19 Feb, 10am – 12 noon, Lloyds
Using the poems she entered for the 2020 Women Poets’ Prize as a base, Natalie Linh Bolderston will provide an insight into her writing process and how she generates, curates and pieces together the fragments that make up her work. She will lead writing exercises and provide prompts that reflect some of her own techniques and formal constraints. Participants will be encouraged to identify and examine the moments of wonder that hover in memory, personal history, and everyday rituals. The creative exercises will help you harness the power of such fragments to construct poems that are more than the sum of their parts.
In Association with Rebecca Swift Women’s Prize
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £16.50)
Poetry Society Young Poets Takeover: Feat Dale Booton, Aliyah Begum & Tom Rowe, plus young person’s open mic!
Sat 19 Feb, 11am – 12.10pm, Patrick Studio
The Poetry Society’s Young Poets Takeovers are a space for up-and-coming young poets and performers to meet one another and share their work on stage.
This Takeover will be hosted by Dale Booton, and feature headline sets from former Birmingham Young Poet Laureate Aliyah Begum and award-winning young poet Tom Rowe.
If you’re aged 25 or younger, we want to hear from you, too! Bring one poem and arrive from 10:30am to sign up for our open mic. We welcome all styles of poetry, and writers at all stages in their development. It’s first come, first served and open mic slots are popular, so arrive promptly to get your name on the list.
We invite you to stay on afterwards for free refreshments and a chance to meet other young poetry lovers. You will be witnessing some of the poets of the future!
In association with The Poetry Society
Tickets FREE
Jo Bell Workshop: Straight To The Point
Sat 19 Feb, 12 noon – 2pm, Gowling
In an intensive, lively two-hour session, poetry dynamo Jo Bell (Kith, How To Be A Poet) presents surefire techniques to correct common weaknesses in poetry. Make your poems powerful and clear without losing strength or subtlety; be bold in editing; refine your bag of tricks to hold the reader’s interest.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £16.50)
Fiona Benson Workshop: Magical Thinking
Sat 19 Feb, 12.30 – 2.30pm, Lloyds
In this workshop we will delve into our own personal treasure troves of magical thinking – excavating superstitions and superstitious sayings, folk tales that are meaningful to us, rituals, ghost stories and urban legends.
Learning from poets like Robin Robertson, Sophie Herxheimer, Sarah Howe and Rachael Allen, we will learn to look for a folk strand in poetry, and create some magical first drafts to take away and work on. All levels welcome.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £16.50)
Third Verve Poetry Performance Lecture – Stephanie Sy-Quia: Exiled Texts and Fractured Anecdotal Histories
Sat 19 Feb, 12.30 – 1.25pm, Patrick Studio
In this year’s Performance-Lecture, Stephanie Sy-Quia will use poetry to think through mixed race identity, female embodiment, and how ‘structures of faith’ abide in contemporary life – exploring nation states, heteronormative family ideals, and museums as shrines to colonialism.
Through a diverse range of poetic and cultural touchpoints – including George Herbert’s metaphysical work The Temple, John Donne’s love poetry, Ariana Grande’s ‘God is a Woman’, and her own recent collection Amnion – Stephanie will explore how exiled texts and the fractured anecdotal histories of mixed race families can subvert conventional ideologies, asking what do we enshrine and how do these practices ‘other’ those outside of these traditional structures?
This event is co-produced by Poetry School.
Tickets £6.50 (concessions £4.50)
Poet On A Podium: Sophie Sparham
Sat 19 Feb, 1.05 – 1.35pm, PWC
Sophie Sparham’s incedible second collection, The Man Who Ate 50,000 Weetabix (Verve Poetry Press, 2021) cemented her status as a poet who tells it as she sees it and can really connect with people, either written down or at the mic. She can’t wait to welcome you to an intimate performance in our cosy Podium Event Space.
Tickets £3
One-off Online Indie Poetry Press Festival VERVE Special
Sat 19 Feb, 2 – 3.25pm, Patrick Studio
OOIPP is an online poetry festival founded in 2021 by Jake Wild Hall with the aim of bringing together a selection of the best Indie publishers from across the uk to showcase their work. The firs year we ran for a week with seven events showcasing 15 publishers and 57 poets. We hope to expand in 2022.
OOIPP at Verve is an event that will brin you a taste of what OOIPP and the Indie publishers have to offer. With work being showcased by Bad Betty Press, The Poetry Business and Broken Sleep. Poets featuring will be Eve Esfandiari-Denney, Molly Naylor, Gboyega Odubanjo, Sarah Barnsley, Azad Sharma and Sam Quill.
The publishers will be repped by Amy Acre (Bad Betty Press), Aaron Kent (Broken Sleep) and Suzannah Evans (Poetry Business).
Tickets £6.50 (concessions £4.50)
Jack Underwood Workshop: Not Understanding Poetry
Sat 19 Feb, 2.30 – 4.30pm, Gowling
Who has ever fallen in love with a poem because they understood it? Poetry is often spoken about as something inaccessible, obscure, difficult to understand, or nonsensical, and as poets we can respond to these negative portrayals defensively, keeping our poems literal, or linear in their thinking. This workshop will explore the limits of meaning and meaninglessness, test and explore how poems can invite creative and imaginative participation rather than offer a passive experience. We will look at poems on the edge of song, poems that keep their subject hidden offstage, poems that attempt a strange new arithmetic in language and logic, and examine poetry’s potential as a mechanism for questioning the world and our relation to it.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £16.50)
Leo Boix Poetry Translation Workshop
Sat 19 Feb, 3 – 5pm, Lloyds
Join poet and translator Leo Boix for a creative translation workshop on the Spanish poetry of Argentinian writer Diana Bellessi.
During the session you will work as a group to create a new translation of one of Bellessi’s poems. As facilitator and guest translator, Boix will be on hand throughout to offer insight into the nuances of the language and culture, and give suggestions to help shape the English translation that is made. Spanish and non-Spanish speakers are welcome – you will work from a guide translation provided by the translator as a starting point.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £16.50)
Poet On A Podium: Rushika Wick
Sat 19 Feb, 3.35 – 3.50pm, PWC
Join Forwards highly commended poet Rushika Wick for an intimate and inspiring reading with limited seating in our cosy Podium Event Space. South London based doctor Rushika’s debut full collection, Afterlife As Trash, was published in March by Verve Poetry Press.
Tickets £3
Transnational Lag Express: The Coventry and Beirut Youthful Cities Exchange
Sat 19 Feb, 4 – 5pm, Patrick Studio
Twelve writers and artists from Coventry and Beirut explore personal and collective journeys in an amalgamation of poetry, dance, spoken word, live performance and video, as twelve strangers embark on a fictional train ride from Coventry to Beirut and back again. At its height, Lebanon had about 408 km of railway. Yet today, although traces remain, none operate. In the UK, privatised railways are hardly accessible to everyone.
This work has been created as part of the Coventry UK City of Culture Youthful Cities Cultural Exchange Programme a partnership between Coventry City of Culture Trust, the British Council and Youthful Cities, established to facilitate a cultural and creative skills exchange between young people across the globe. It has been developed to enable young adults (age 18-25) to creatively respond to important, urgent and youth-focused issues in their cities, encouraging more active participation in civic matters.
The Coventry and Beirut Youthful Cities exchange is led by B.A.C.E (Be A Change Everywhere, founded by poet John Bernard) in Coventry and Rusted Radishes, Literary and Art Journal in Beirut.
The young artists involved are: Megan Waters (Coventry), Theotima Ioannou (Coventry), Lewis Driver (Coventry), Alice Richmond (Coventry), Christina Okorie (Coventry), Kelvin Adomako Ampong (Coventry), J.D Harlock (Beirut), Nur Turkmani (Beirut), Amina Hassan (Beirut), Yasmina Tabbal (Beirut), Nour Annan (Beirut) and Alfred Jeffrey Naddaff (Beirut).
Tickets £6.50 (concessions £4.50)
Fiona Benson, Kim Moore, Parwana Fayyaz, Host Jo Bell
Sat 19 Feb, 5.30 – 6.55pm, Patrick Studio
Our regular Saturday Evening poetry headline is always a festival highlight.
This year we feature three incredible poets who are contributing ground breaking new work to the conteppory UK poetry scene. Fiona Benson’s third collection, Ephemeron (Jonathan Cape, 2022) is brand new for Verve 2022. Her previous collection, Vertigo & Ghost, (Cape, 2017) won the Forward Prize and the Roehampton Poetry Prize. Kim Moore’s first full collection, The Art of Falling (Seren 2015) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, while her second All The Men I Never Married was published by Seren in 2021. Parwana Fayyaz’s debut collection, Forty Names, (Carcanet 2021) contains her 2019 Forward Prize Best Single Poem winner of the same name, and is an astonishing debut. 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).
Sponsored by Worcester Uni
Tickets £6.50 (concessions £4.50)
Poet On A Podium: Beth Calverley
Sat 19 Feb, 7.05 – 7.20pm, PWC
You’ll see Beth Calverley with her Poetry Machine in our VERVE Poetry Fayre this year. Now hear her poetry! Beth with be reading from her debut collection, Brave Faces & Other Smiles (Verve Poetry Press, 2020), in our cosy Podium Event Space. Don’t miss out!
Tickets £3
That’s What We Said Verve Special: Hosted by Bridget Hart and with open mic
Sat 19 Feb, 7.30 – 9.30pm, Patrick Studio
For Books’ Sake presents: That’s What We Said, a queer feminist poetry night led by non-binary and women performers. We aim to curate live poetry events that celebrate the power of queer identities, resilience and joy. Join us for a long overdue party at VERVE this year, with very special guests Rosie Garland, Maz Hedgehog and afshan d’souza-lodhi.
Plus 6 open mic slots available for marginalised genders, email bridget@forbookssake.net to register.
In partnership with For Books’ Sake
Tickets £6.50 (concessions £4.50)
Concession tickets are available to senior citizens, school pupils, students, people registered as disabled or unemployed.
Jo Flynn / For Books’ Sake Workshop: Writing your Intuition
Sun 20 Feb, 10am – 12 noon, Gowling
Join For Books’ Sake for a creative writing workshop inspired by intuition, meditation and tarot. We’ll be using imagery and poetry to get writing with confidence, although no prior experience of meditation tools or tarot is necessary, just come along and have a go for a relaxing writing session that might just be the start of a great adventure. It’s the perfect way to get in touch with your creativity before the evening events begin!
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £16.50)
Kostya Tsolakis Let’s Get Classical! Responding to Greek and Roman Poetry
Sun 20 Feb, 10.30am – 12.30pm, Lloyds
Love Sappho, Ovid and Catullus? So does Kostya Tsolakis! In this workshop, Kostya – editor of harana poetry, the online magazine for poets writing in English as a second or parallel language, and author of Ephebos (ignitionpress, 2020) – will share his favourite contemporary responses to Ancient Greek and Roman poets, including by Clare Pollard, Ted Hughes, Leontia Flynn and Jordi Alonso, and encourage you to write your own poems inspired by some of Classical Antiquity’s big poetic hits. Expect lyricism, profanity, terrible gods and dead sparrows.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £16.50)
The Verve Poetry Festival Competition Event: Beginnings, hosted by Caroline Bird
Sun 20 Feb, 11am – 12.25pm, Patrick Studio
The Verve Competition on the Theme of Beginnings was open for entries in the Summer of 2021, and judged by the wonderful Caroline Bird.
This FREE to attend event will feature all the winners and commended poets, as well as four commissioned poets, who will read their poems on our subject and help launch our annual festival anthology. The event will be hosted by Caroline herself and will be a fun and lively affair, featuring poets of all kinds and levels of experience. Dare you miss it?
Tickets FREE
Kim Moore Workshop: One Train May Hide Another Train
Sun 20 Feb, 12.30 – 2.30pm, Gowling
Taking inspiration from Kenneth Koch’s poem of the same name – during this workshop we will examine hidden-ness, misdirection and disappearing in poetry. We will look at the use of titles to cast a different light on a poem, poems with a secret or an epiphany folded inside them and poems where the self apparently vanishes, only to reappear in another form.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £16.50)
Poet On A Podium: Kathryn O’Driscoll
Sun 20 Feb, 12.35 – 12.50pm, PWC
UK Slam Champion Kathryn’s brand new debut poetry collection, Cliff Notes, (Verve Poetry Press, 2022) perfectly straddles the page and the stage. Join her in our cosy Podium Event Space for an intimate and deep felt performance.
Tickets £3
Kat Lyons presents excerpts from Dry Season
Sun 20 Feb, 1 – 2pm, Patrick Studio
Menopause? Seriously? WTF? Join Kat for a performance of poetry from their debut collection from Verve Poetry Press and low-tech excerpts from Dry Season to launch the show’s UK tour. Expect honest explorations of perimenopausal chaos and musings on societal ideas of age and gender, as well as poems about love, grief and living though both.
Tickets £6.50 (concessions £4.50)
Diana Bellessi & Leo Boix: To Love A Woman / Amar a una mujer
Sun 20 Feb, 2.30 – 3.55pm, Patrick Studio
Join Argentinian poet Diana Bellessi and translator Leo Boix to celebrate the publication of To Love A Woman with Poetry Translation Centre. Bellessi is a groundbreaking writer who is been credited as the godmother of Lesbian poetry in Latin America. Over the decades she has championed feminist and LGBTQI+ issues and themes, and has exerted a strong influence on prominent poets and writers from the 1980’s through to the present day. Many of her poems are only now appearing in English. In this dual language event Bellessi and Boix will be reading from To Love A Woman in the original Spanish with English translations, and discussing her life and work.
Tickets £6.50 (concessions £4.50)
Caroline Bird Workshop: The ‘I’ in Poetry
Sun 20 Feb, 3 – 5pm, Gowling
I am not the “I” in my poems. “I” is the net I try to pull me in with. – Toi Derricotte
Who are you? Who is the speaker of your poems? In this workshop, we’ll use the ‘I’ as a disguise, a net, a shield, an illusion, a dare. We’ll write from the point of view of a self we don’t recognise yet. We’ll stumble off through the forest of the page, further and further from ourselves, hoping to meet a new version walking back to us.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £16.50)
Kat Lyons Workshop: Reconnecting With The Body
Sun 20 Feb, 3.30 – 5.30pm, Lloyds
Our bodies are often a site of conflict and discontent. This creative writing workshop will focus on nurturing positive re/connection and bringing the corporeal into the craft of writing. Participants will look at poetry centring the body/bodily experiences, examine techniques to bring those onto the page, and use writing exercises and discussion to explore their own experiences and relationship to their body. For all genders and levels of writing experience. Suitable for ages 16+.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £16.50)
Poet On A Podium: Sean Wai Keung
Sun 20 Feb, 4.05 – 4.20pm, PWC
Join Sean Wai Keung for an intimate and enthralling reading with limited seating in our cosy Podium Event Space. Glasgow based Sean’s debut full collection, Sikfan Glasgow, was published in March by Verve Poetry Press.
Tickets £3
MPK Anthology Party: with host Bohdan Piasecki and open mic
Sun 20 Feb, 4.30 – 6.30pm, Patrick Studio
In 2001 Malika Booker and Roger Robinson were young, black poets being overlooked by the poetry establishment, but serious about their work and dedicated to their craft. They invited other poets to join them around Malika’s kitchen table in Brixton every Friday night to inspire and encourage each other, share ideas and workshop poems.
Twenty years later, Malika’s Poetry Kitchen still meets on Friday nights and celebrates its first two decades with an anniversary anthology, Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different, featuring new poems from more than 60 members of the MPK family. This diverse collective has nurtured some of the finest poets to emerge in the UK this century – join Fahad Al-Amoudi, Kostya Tsolakis, director Jill Abram and Khairani Barokka to hear some of the poems they have cooked up around the Kitchen table in what will be a lively and celebratory event!
Tickets £6.50 (concessions 4.50)
Poet On A Podium: Elaine Beckett
Sun 20 Feb, 6.35 – 6.50pm, PWC
Faber pamphleteer Elaine will read from her astonishing debut full collection Sea Creature Regrows Entire Body (Verve Poetry Press, 2021) in our last cosy Podium event of the weekend. Join her!
Tickets £3
Pascale Petit, Ian Duhig, Rachel Long
Sun 20 Feb, 7 – 8.30pm, Patrick Studio
Our final headline event of the weekend brings three vital poets together to read and talk about their work. Pascale Petit’seighth collection, Tiger Girl (Bloodaxe Books, 2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and for Wales Book of the Year. A poem from the book won the Keats-Shelley Prize. Her seventh collection, Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), won the inaugural Laurel Prize for eco-poetry, and the RSL’s Ondaatje Prize. Ian Duhig is a Cholmondeley Award recipient and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature whose Selected Poems were published by Picador in 2021. Rachel Long’s debut collection, My Darling from the Lions (Picador 2020 / Tin House 2021) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, The Costa Book Award, The Rathbones Folio Prize, and the Jhalak Prize. This wonderful line-up, a real treat, will be hosted for us by Jonathan Davidson from Writing West Midlands and founder of Birmingham Literature Festival.
Sponsored by University of Wolverhampton
Tickets £6.50 (concessions 4.50)