Birmingham’s own Verve Festival of Poetry and Spoken Word is back at Birmingham Hippodrome!
Now in its eighth 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.
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 the Schools Slam Final on Wed 12 Feb).
£60 (concessions £45)
Saturday Pass
Includes entry to all events on Sat 15 Feb (excluding workshops).
£35 (concessions £26)
Sunday Pass
Includes entry to all events on Sun 16 Feb (excluding workshops).
£20 (concessions £15)
Concession tickets are available to senior citizens, school pupils, students, people registered as disabled or unemployed.
VERVE BIRMINGHAM SCHOOLS SLAM FINAL: Hosted by Spoz Poet Opening
Wed 12 Feb, 7pm-9pm, Patrick Studio
#VERVE2025 is our fourth Birmingam Schools Slam Final! We’ve invited twelve local Primary Schools to bring a team of their best poets to this exciting competition hosted and facilitated by Brummie gem and VERVE Poetry Press poet Giovanni ‘Spoz’ Esposito! But there’s more! Our judges will consist of two local poets well versed (get it!) in the art of poetry – Birmingham Poet Laureate Ayan Aden and Birmingham Young Poet Laureate Japmeh Kaur Gujral. Both poets will deliver a short and entertaining set of their work and act as judges. Come and support the poetry stars of the future through their first ever poetry slam!
Tickets £7
LOUD POETS SLAM 2025 BIRMINGHAM HEAT at VERVE
Thu 13 Feb, 7.30pm-9.30pm, Patrick Studio
The prestigious Loud Poets Slam Series has expanded, and VERVE is hosting its first-ever Birmingham based heat! Watch top poets from West Midlands and beyond compete in one of 10 heats taking place across Scotland and England for the biggest prize in UK slam poetry. The winner will take home £200 and qualify for the 2025 Grand Slam Final in Edinburgh, with a £3,000 cash prize! Featuring Jasmine Gardosi as sacrificial poet, this slam heat will be an electric celebration of the very best of spoken word.
Sign up via iamloud.co/slam, NB sign ups will close on 3rd February 2025.
I Am Loud started in 2014 as Loud Poets, a live spoken word poetry showcase. Since then they have grown into a multidisciplinary production and entertainment company while keeping live events at the heart of their work. From monthly shows to open mics, tours, and festival performances, I Am Loud showcases the best of spoken word work coming out of Scotland and the UK today.
Tickets £10 (concessions £8)
Scarlett Ward Workshop – Speaking the silences: language of the lacuna
Fri 14 Feb, 1pm-3pm, Workshop Room 1
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?
Tickets £16 (concessions £12)
Ellora Sutton Workshop – You wouldn’t steal a poem – a playful revolution
Fri 14 Feb, 1.30pm-3.30pm, Workshop Room 2
“What is poetry if not the revolutionary moment of language? […] It is liberated language, language recovering its richness” – Situationist International
“Poetry means taking control of the language of your life.” – June Jordan
Often, we have no control over the language of our lives. The forms we have to fill, the emails we have to send, the music being played in the supermarket, the names of the roads we follow, the adverts we walk or scroll or flick past. In this workshop, we’ll take back control of the language we live by, exploring the Situationist technique of détournement to liberate language and release the unruly poetic potential in everything from reality TV to coding, online advertising to poetry submission guidelines. We’ll look at pieces by poets including Astra Papachristodoulou, Hala Alyan, and Chris McCabe as we set out on the playful work of taking back control.
Tickets £16 (concessions £12)
Susannah Dickey Workshop – Lyric Shame
Fri 14 Feb, 3.30pm-5.30pm, Workshop Room 1
“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.
Tickets £24.50 (concessions £18.50)
Dzifa Benson Workshop – Turning movement into poetry
Fri 14 Feb, 4pm-6pm, Workshop Room 2
This ambitious and experimental workshop channels choreographer and dance theorist Rudolf Laban’s techniques. According to Laban, human beings move not only from place to place but also from mood to mood so his ideas can apply to the composition of embodied poetry as much as they can to choreographed movement. Laban also encouraged physical, emotional, sensual and intellectual integration which, in the workshop, will translate as poetic rhythms that can be understood and experienced by the body in motion. To this end, participants will be led through a process of writing poetry inspired by Laban’s mapping system of purposeful movement in order to write impactful poetry.
Tickets £24.50 (concessions £18.50)
THE PAMPHLET HOUR Laurie Bolger, Troy Cabida, Betty Doyle, Ellora Sutton with host Sabeen Chaudhry
Fri 14 Feb, 7pm-8pm, Patrick Studio
BRAND NEW at VERVE is this pamphlet focussed event which brings four stellar pamphleteers from some of our favourite indie poetry presses together to chat about this glorious format and read some of their poetry! Laurie Bolger will read from Makeover (Emma Press, 2024), Troy Cabida will read from Symmetric of Bone (Fourteen Poems, 2014), Betty Doyle from her second pamphlet Fruits of Labour (Seren, 2024) and Ellora from her second pamphlet, Artisnal Slush (VERVE Poetry Press, 2023). Hosted by Ledbury Poetry’s Sabeen Chaudhry.
Tickets £8 (concessions £6)
FRIDAY NIGHT HEADLINE EVENT Dzifa Benson, Anthony Joseph, Richard Scott with host Helen Bowell
Fri 14 Feb, 8.30pm-9.45pm, Patrick Studio
Our regular Friday evening poetry headline event features three incredible contempory poets. Dzifa Benson will read from their long awaited debut full collection Monster (Bloodaxe, 2024) TS Eliot prize-winner Anthony Joseph debut’s at VERVE with his recently released selected poems Prcious & Impossible (Bloomsbury, 2024). And Richard Scott appears to celebrate the February publication of his second full collection, That Broke into Shining Crystals (Faber, 2025) Hosting these three wonderful poets for readings and discussion is Helen Bowell, whose debut pamphlet, The Barman (Bad Betty, 2022), was a PBS Summer Pamphlet Choice.
Tickets £10 (concessions £8)
Laurie Bolger Workshop – Writing The Everyday: Making the Ordinary Extraordinary
Sat 15 Feb, 9.30am-11.30am, Workshop Room 1
Bring your writing home & write the ordinary extraordinarily with poet Laurie Bolger.
During this session we’ll be looking at writing inspired by The Everyday. This is a chance to work in a close & relaxed group & mix up your writing with some lovely prompts & surprises. Perfect YOU time to get cosy & open those notebooks.
All levels welcome!
Tickets £24.50 (concessions £18.50)
Anthony Joseph Workshop – The Sonnet: Inside and Outside of Form
Sat 15 Feb, 10am – 12 noon, Workshop Room 2
Part of the sonnet’s resilience lies in its somewhat metaphysical debt to structures found universally in nature and human experience. Taking this as a starting point, this workshop explores the ways in which poets can find a personal affinity with the sonnet. Through reading and group exercises poets will uncover ways in which the rigidity of the sonnet can also be intimate, resonating with their individual voices.
Everyone welcome to this inspiring workshop from a T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet.
Tickets £24.50 (concessions £18.50)
Poetry Society Young Poets Takeover: incl young person’s open mic! NOW LARGER!
Sat 15 Feb, 11am-12.30pm, 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 feature headline sets from Yemeni writer and poet Yousef Alawi, multiple Foyle Young Poet of the Year Lauren Lisk and Young Producer at Derby Poetry Festival Tilly Wiggins.
If you’re aged 25 or younger, we want to hear from you, too! Bring a poem and arrive early to sign up for our open mic. And join the community! We invite you to stay on afterwards for free refreshments and a chance to meet other young poetry lovers and find out more about Young Poets Network!
Tickets FREE
Richard Scott Workshop – Ancestry, Intertextuality and Ghosts
Sat 15 Feb, 12 noon-2pm, Workshop Room 1
‘The houses are haunted’, writes Wallace Stevens and maybe, by this, he means poetry. Join Richard Scott for this workshop in which we’ll consider our poetic ancestors and how they might inspire – through intertextuality, idea and form – our writing now. We’ll be doing writing exercises and discussing poems together as we become, in the words of Lucie Brock-Broido, ‘a freak of letters crossing down a rare / Path bleak with poplars’.
Tickets £24.50 (concessions £18.50)
Theresa Lola Workshop – After Poems
Sat 15 Feb, 12.30pm-2.30pm, Workshop Room 2
After poems’, developing strategies for responding to other poems, and going from inspiration to innovation. As T.S. Eliot says ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone’. We are in many ways always responding to what we take in. After poems are more intentional in their acknowledgement of the source. We’ll discuss, read, and write together.
Tickets £24.50 (concessions £18.50)
Sixth Verve Poetry Performance Lecture – Susannah Dickey: Why Not You?
Sat 15 Feb, 1pm-2pm, Patrick Studio
In this year’s Poetry Performance Lecture, we join Susannah Dickey in an innovative exploration of the challenges to romantic intimacy posed by the climate crisis. In this new performance piece, set on the island of Hydra, where cars are banned, stray cats outnumber the population, and forest fires encroach, we will be forced to approach language differently – subjugating the ‘I’-centric quality of historic lyric to include the non-human, as both subject and collaborative force.
In creating this ecopoetics of intimacy, the shame of romantic egotism becomes a generative space for thinking collectively about the earth and our place within it. This is a performance in which the speaker wants desperately to communicate love in a different way, using the art form best suited to interrogating language, interrogating selfhood: poetry.
The Verve Performance-Lecture (a stylised form of teaching-as-performance, originating from contemporary art practice), invites a poet to create a new piece of work fusing academic discourse with poetry and spoken word on a subject of their choosing.
Brought to you in association with the Poetry School.
Tickets £8 (concessions £6)
Magma Matters: Past, Present and Future
Sat 15 Feb, 2.30pm-4pm, Patrick Studio
Join us for a live version of the magazine with editors and poets who have been part of the Magma journey. This LIVE version of Magma looks at recent issues, including Obsidian and Performance, and the current Grassroots issue, and explores what future issues aim to achieve through a dynamic showcase with audience interaction.
A great line-up of poets will share their work and link it to Magma features. Elontra Hall and Sam Pereira-Madder will discuss performance poetry, taking their lead from the exchange in the Performance issue. Co-editor Josiane Smith will lead the discussion and take questions from the audience.
The Reviews element of Magma pays tribute to Gboyega Odubanjo’s Adam, his posthumous collection published by Faber. Gboyega was Magma’s co-Chair and is now its Presiding Spirit and while Magma misses a dear friend and colleague, we celebrate his legacy and urge people to support the Gboyega Odubanjo Foundation for low-income Black writers.
Magma’s Inspired Feature will be performed by Amy Acre – a good friend of Magma and Judge of this year’s annual competition. She will share insights into what she looks for in competition-winning poems and take questions from the audience as well as reading from her celebrated first collection, Mothersong (Boomsbury Poetry). Magma is proud to make Nafeesa Hamid our Selected Poet for the Verve Poetry Festival.
Tickets £8 (concessions £6)
Helen Calcutt Workshop – Visiting Mary
Sat 15 Feb, 2.30pm-4.30pm, Workshop Room 1
Lead by Helen Calcutt, 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.
Tickets £24.50 (concessions £18.50)
Ruth Padel Workshop – The Swerve
Sat 15 Feb, 3pm-5pm, Workshop Room 2
The Swerve: a poem on a moment of change in your own or someone else’s life
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. The point of this is to emerge with a poem about change which also embodies change.
Tickets £24.50 (concessions £18.50)
POETRY UNBOUND SPECIAL at VERVE: Mimi Khalvati with Padraig O Tuama.
Sat 15 Feb, 4.30pm-5.30pm, Patrick Studio
Mimi Khalvati was recently awarded the Kings Gold Medal for Poetry and her Collected Poems were published in 2024 by Carcanet. Padraig O Tuama’s new collection is out in January 2025 and he hosts the celebrated podcast, Poetry Unbound, in which he reads and explores some of his favourite poems. What better than to bring these two together to discuss Mimi’s poems and talk about her poetic journey to this point? And celebrate the work of one of the nation’s favourite poets.
Tickets £8 (concessions £6)
SATURDAY NIGHT HEADLINE EVENT: Theresa Lola, Victoria Kennefick, Anthony Vahni Capildeo with host Jo Bell
Sat 15 Feb, 6pm-7.30pm, Patrick Studio
This year’s Saturday evening headline features 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 Book Society Spring Choice 2024. Theresa joins us to celebrate publication of her revered 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).
Tickets £10 (concessions £8)
BIG GAY POETRY NIGHT VERVE SPECIAL hosted by Bradely Taylor & M L Walsh
Sat 15 Feb, 8pm-10pm, Patrick Studio
Don your fishnets, stick your lippy on and get out your gayest poems for a celebration of all things queer poetry with THE BIG GAY POETRY NIGHT, hosted by your favourite (and biggest) gays on the Birmingham poetry scene Bradley Taylor and M L Walsh.
Featuring headline performances from Joelle Taylor, Kandace Siobhan Walker and Sanah Ahsan – as well as an open mic – this will be an evening that showcases some of the very best and most influential voices in poetry today with a party atmosphere that will get you to your feet! Don’t miss this!
Tickets £10 (concessions £8)
Carrie Etter Workshop – The Wall Thin as a Wren’s Bone: Simile in Poetry
Sun 16 Feb, 9.30am-11.30am, Workshop Room 1
The description: Part of our attraction to poetry is our attraction to figurative language in the form of similes and metaphors, and here we’ll focus on similes, beginning with Dylan Thomas’s ‘wall thin as a wren’s bone’. We’ll analyse what makes similes effective by looking at examples from a wide range of examples, then use our own to draft a new poem.
Tickets £24.50 (concessions £18.50)
Padraig O Tuama Workshop – You. You. You. The Lyric Address in Poetry
Sun 16 Feb, 10am-12 noon, Workshop Room 2
A poem is a word event going in many directions at once. Sometimes the you of a poem is a specific person, other times it’s the poet, other times it’s a general audience, and still other times, there’s no you at all, so the poem addresses itself to the world, or an unnamed and unsummoned character. In this talk, Padraig O Tuama will explore the direction, implication and inspiration contained in the lyric address in contemporary poetry.
Tickets £24.50 (concessions £18.50)
The Verve Poetry Festival Competition Event with judge and host Hannah Lowe
Sun 16 Feb, 11am-12.30pm, Patrick Studio
The Verve Competition on the Theme of Poets and Poetry opened for entries late in 2024, judged by the wonderful Hannah Lowe. We also opened to competition up to entries from 11-17 year olds.
This FREE to attend event will feature all the winners and commended poets plus ten selected from our 11-17 entries. The poets will read their poems on our subject and help launch our annual festival anthology. The event will be hosted by Hannah herself and will be a fun and lively affair, featuring poets of all kinds and levels of experience. Always a festival highlight!
Tickets FREE
Anthony Vahni Capildeo Workshop – Valentines Hot & Cold
Sun 16 Feb, 12 noon-2pm, Workshop Room 1
Bring your roses and your thorns to this unashamed workshop. What is love? Still unsure? Love your pet? Love being alone? Unleash the language your heart speaks: queer joy or winter blues, tricksiness or comradeship, sweet and bitter foolishness. Sometimes silence or stumbling words can be the most expressive. And just how can we love in dark times? We’ll dip in and out of sad, glad, and in-between moods, inspired by ancient and modern material. You might find yourself writing a letter to St Valentine in prison, or changing the mottos on love heart candies. The creative prompts in this workshop will encourage you to rethink your definition of love, where to find it, and how to express it.
Tickets £24.50 (concessions £18.50)
Victoria Kennefick Workshop – A Family Affair
Sun 16 Feb, 12.30pm-2.30pm, Workshop Room 2
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.
Tickets £24.50 (concessions £18.50)
Discovering The New Carthaginians with Nick Makoha
Sun 16 Feb, 1pm-1.45pm, Patrick Studio
One of the most exciting publications of 2025 will be Nick Makoha’s The New Carthaginians (Penguin, Feb 28th 2025). We are thrilled to have exclusive early copies of this wonderful new title and to feature an extended reading from Nick along with a short interview to discover more about this wonderful book!
Concerned throughout with flight and falling, the sample and the loop, The New Carthaginians is a poetry collection of staggering originality: a work by an author at the height of his powers, in which the familiar Western canons of art, history and philosophy are prised apart and reassembled in a new configuration. ‘In this book, Nick Makoha has found an otherworldly, visionary voice and diction that arrest you from the first page and never let you go.’ Jason Allen-Paisant. Don’t miss this thrilling and unique event.
Tickets £8 (concessions £6)
SUNDAY HEADLINE EVENT: Helen Calcutt, Carrie Etter, Ruth Padel, Padraig O Tuama
Sun 16 Feb, 2.30pm-4pm, Patrick Studio
Our final headline event of the weekend brings not three but four wonderful poets together to read and talk about their work. Birmingham’s very own Helen Calcutt will read from her break out collection, Feeling All The Kills (Pavilion, 2024). Carrie Etter will read from her fifth full collection, Grief’s Alphabet (Seren, 2024). Poetry royalty, Ruth Padel’s most recent collection, Girl (Chatto, 2024) is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.
Joining them, host of Poetry Unbound Padraig O Tuama will read from his brand new collection, Kitchen Hymns (Cheerio, 2025). This amazing line-up, a real treat, will be hosted for us by Jonathan Davidson from Writing West Midlands and founder of Birmingham Literature Festival.
Tickets £10 (concessions £8)
Aoife Lyall Workshop – Soundscape
Sun 16 Feb, 2.30pm-4.30pm, Workshop Room 1
Join Aoife Lyall for this exciting and invigorating workshop on how to write, edit and elevate soundscape in poetry. Starting with some light terminology and a heady mixture of classic and contemporary poems to draw inspiration from, this is a workshop for anyone and everyone who is enamoured, baffled, or bewildered by the concept and significance of sound in poetry. Guaranteed to deepen your love and understanding of every syllable you give to the page, this session will give you the confidence to go deeper into the poems you love, and to make your own words sing. Not to be missed!
Tickets £24.50 (concessions £18.50)
Emma Press Workshop – Whiching and Pitching: Putting together your pamphlet for submission.
Sun 16 Feb, 4pm-6pm, Workshop Room 2
Thinking about collecting your poems into a first pamphlet? Bring your idea and join this demystifying workshop run by Birmingham publisher The Emma Press.
In considering what editors are looking for in a pamphlet, we will see what we can learn from some of the best recent publications and get thinking about how to select and order your own poems.
The session will explore the range of poetry publishers and consider how to pitch, how to talk about your work, and how to know your audiences.
With plenty of time for questions and discussion on good practice and common pitfalls, you’ll leave with key footholds for you next steps on your publication journey. This workshop will be run by Emma Press editor James Trevelyan.
Tickets £24.50 (concessions £18.50)
VERVE CLOSING GALA WITH OPEN MIC hosted by Sam J Grudgings
Sun 16 Feb, 4.30pm-6.30pm, Patrick Studio
WE KNOW how to host a lively, fun and uplifting OPEN MIC event at VERVE, so 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 February 2026!
Tickets £8 (concessions £16)