When we first set up Yes We Cant, our monthly poetry night, it was upstairs in the Pretty Bricks pub (a lovely real ale pub in Walsall, well worth a visit if you’re over that way). Then Covid happened, and – like every other live poetry event in the country – we moved online. For the past four years, Yes We Cant has been a pay-as-you-feel event on Zoom, held on the first Sunday of the month, but last Sunday’s was the final one in this format.
For the past year or more we’ve been looking for a suitable venue where we can hold an in-person event which we livestream to anyone joining in from home. Finding one is proving extraordinarily difficult, though we’re hopeful we may have something lined up (more news on that front as and when we have it). What is clear, though, is that a purely online event is far less attractive than it was, say, eighteen months ago. Numbers attending have dropped and dropped, which makes it increasingly difficult to pay our headliners and ‘Alf Enders – and while PPP have never paid ourselves anything for running Yes We Cant since we first set it up in 2017, we aren’t in a position to dip into our own pockets to keep it going, either.
Against that background, making last night the final online edition of Yes We Cant was a no-brainer. But what a way for it to bow out! In a departure from the norm, we had co-headliners in the form of Gill & Mark Connors, reading from their shared anthology ‘The Where We Were’ (Yaffle Press) and the back-and-forth from one to the other, each picking up on a theme the other had touched on in their previous poem… well, that would have made for an excellent night on its own. Luckily for us – and everyone else who was there – the contributions from our ten open-mic poets took the night to another level entirely, and were each outstanding in their own right.
Thanks to Gill, Mark, our open mic poets, and our audience for a great night of poetry. Thanks, too, to everyone who’s ever supported Yes We Cant. Without you, it simply wouldn’t happen. Keep your eyes peeled for the next, exciting step in its evolution!
PPP
5th March 2025