2024 Lineup

This workshop presents prompts and exercises from The Right Words project, a heartfelt endeavor to guide mothers who have experienced baby loss through self-authorship and creative writing. Gently find the right words to accompany and process grief. Find routes to translate loss through poetry, develop emotional awareness, tend and honour grief. This workshop allows participants to explore their emotions in a supportive and empathetic community.

Funded by Arts Council England and the Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Trust, “The Right Words” was part of the BEDLAM Arts & Mental Health Programme, offering a series of sessions that help you ease into therapeutic writing and creativity. The project has featured at MAC and The Poetry Pharmacy.

Explore the sonnet form in this workshop with Josie Alford, a poet, youtuber and sonnet nerd (no, seriously, she wrote her dissertation on sonnets). We’ll examine the 14-line structure, delving into the realms of Shakespearean and Petrarchan styles. From iambic pentameter to volta, you’ll discover the poetic nuances that define sonnets and engage in discussions on themes, ranging from love and mortality to societal reflections.

Participants will craft their own sonnets, honing their creativity and experience the art of expressing profound emotions within the confines of structured verse. This workshop promises a deep dive into the sonnet form’s rich history and empowers participants to add to that history.

In this workshop we will consider what strategies for composition and radical reflection come from our dream plots. We will consider the shared processes between dreaming and writing. We will find space to explore the peculiar imaginative shapes that occur to us during dreams, observing what languages of invention are being created there, and how to channel that language into new poetry.

With this year’s Poetry School Performance Lecturer Holly Pester.

In The Poet’s Companion, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux note that images should “produce a bit of magic, a reality so real it is ‘like being alive twice.’”

As poets, after mining our respective memories, how do we deepen a reader’s experience with the poem via the image? How does one draft a lasting image?

This workshop will explore the image and its implications. Participants in this all-level, generative workshop will review poems with images that reverberate and draft poems inspired by that work.

Our regular Friday evening poetry headline event features three incredible contemporary poets. Seán Hewitt’s debut full collection Tongues of Fire (Cape, 2020) won the Laurel Prize in 2021, and the follow up, Rapture’s Road (Cape, 2024) is brand new for VERVE.

Jason Allen-Paisant’s lauded debut, Thinking With Trees (Carcanet, 2021) was followed in 2023 by Forward Best Collection winning Self-Portait As Oterllo. Alycia Pirmohamed will be reading from her excellent debut Another Way to Split Water (Birlinn, 2022).

Hosting these three wonderful poets for readings and discussion is Helen Bowell, whose debut pamphlet, The Barman (Bad Betty, 2022), was PBS Summer Pamphlet Choice.

At our last festival we hosted tour first poetry film event and it was wonderful! We even had popcorn! From the 100+ films submitted we chose 14 to show at our Birmingham Hippodrome venue. We were thrilled with the variety and quality of the films we received and therefor were able to show.

From poets reading poems but filmed interestingly, to artistic and chaotically abstract films, via animation and much more, it was a pleasure to be able to show and pay tribute to this wonderful artform. SO we decided to do it again! Come and see what visual and audio wonders we have selected this year! You won’t be disappointed.