Last night we enjoyed the first helping of PASTA for 2026 – and what a feast it was! We’ll be honest, there was some concern in the PPP camp about whether anyone would turn up with an offering on the first half theme of ‘creases’, but the good people of Wolverhampton (and Birmingham!) delivered admirably. We had poems featuring pandas, underwear, folds in the space/time continuum, and why ironing your clothes doesn’t matter when the world is on fire.
The second half brought us song. We can’t think when we last had an acapella contribution to one of our PASTA events, but Daisy’s contribution was so good that we were graced with another musical offering just a few minutes later. Songs are like buses, it seems. You wait forever for one, and then they all turn up at once. We had poems from PASTA first-timers, and PASTA old hands, and the joy of them properly warmed our cockles on a dreich February night.
Dave Pitt was absent with a head cold. Hopefully he’ll be full of beans by this weekend, when we turn our attention to Wolves Lit Fest – there’s events for everyone, whatever your fancy, and we hope to see you there. And talking of beans… the theme for the first half of next month’s PASTA is ‘farts’. Thanks for that, Mogs and the gods of chance who decided that his would be the slip of paper drawn from the pint glass of suggestion.
We can’t wait to hear what you do with that. It’ll be suitably highbrow, we’re sure.
It’s the morning (very possibly the afternoon) after the night before, and we’re basking in the satisfaction of another splendid Wolves Lit Fest poetry slam. A fantastic night of poetry and entertainment watched and enjoyed by an audience which filled the Arena Theatre. We have it on good authority* that there were more people in that one room than have watched ‘Melania’ globally. And that they had a better time.
Our thanks to all fifteen poets who came from across the UK to take part – including the poet who stepped in off the subs bench at the last minute and made it through to the semi-finals. Someone in the audience said at the end of the night that the standard of poetry gets higher each year, and we’d be hard pressed to disagree. The first round included poets performing for the first time in a slam, as well as veterans and winners of dozens of slams, and every last one of them acquitted themselves admirably. The semi-finals were astounding close-run heats where any one of the six poets could have gone through, and then we had the final. And what a final!
Huge congratulations to our winner Glyn Phillips, runner-up Brenda Read-Brown, and Shrewsbury poet Michael Carding, who came third. Each of them bagged some incredible literary prizes (which they’ll very likely be savouring right now), and Glyn also won himself a paid gig at Wolves Lit Fest 2027 where we’ll get to enjoy a full set of his work.
Huge thanks, as always, to our judges – all volunteers, bless ’em, selected on the night. Our gratitude to the staff at the Arena Theatre for making sure everything runs like clockwork, and – above all – thanks to the poets who took part, and the audience who chose to spend a Saturday night laughing, applauding, and enjoying live poetry. We couldn’t do it without you.
* we may have just made that up, but the odds are it’s true
Each year, PPP nominate a local Wolverhampton charity as our charity of the year. As people who come to our nights know, many of our events are PAYF, relying on the audience’s generosity to pay our feature poets. Once we’ve kept the wolf from their door, any remaining funds go toward our local charity, and money raised is topped up over the twelve months with more money which we contribute from our fees for paid work. In 2025, our charity was originally going to be a local food bank. Sadly, it shut down, so we held a PPP meeting over Xmas (translation: a chat over a curry and a couple of pints) and decided that all the money should go to Wolverhampton’s The Haven instead.
The Haven does vitally important work supporting women and children who’ve been on the receiving end of domestic abuse, and thanks to your generosity in supporting our events over the past twelve months, we were able to transfer £509.10 to them so they can continue helping women who need it. You made this happen. Thank you all.
It’s Monday morning, ths sun is shining, Spring is in the air, and we are happily basking in the glow of last night’s Yes We Cant. A Yes We Cant held in an actual physical space! We’ve been wanting to move back to that format – while additionally retaining the online element so we don’t abandon those people who’ve stayed with us over our years on Zoom – for a year or more, but finding the right venue proved to be trickier than we’d hoped or expected. We do have quite a list of requirements, in fairness: available on a Sunday evening, free, accessible, good transport links, plenty of parking, decent internet connection for starters – and the Venn diagram intersection of all those factors in the Wolverhampton area turned out to be vanishingly small.
So we were delighted when the Great Western – a legendary real ale pub just a stone’s throw from Wolverhampton’s train, bus, and tram stations – said yes, they’d give this poetry lark a whirl. We rocked up last night, giving ourselves plenty of time to work out how best to set up within the space available, plug the PA in, and check that the Zoom link worked. Reader, it did. Yes We Cant was up and running.
Those of you who follow what we do will know that at Yes We Cant we normally have a headline poet, an ‘Alf Ender (poet with a new book out), and ten open mic poets. Seeing as we were testing the waters here, and finding out how the Great Wester/Zoom/PPP interface performed, we made the decision to keep this first event an open mic, pure and simple. Our huge thanks to everyone who came along, whether as audience or performer, in the flesh or on Zoom. It was great to see faces we’ve not seen in years, too. We. Had. A. Blast.
We plan to be back at the Great Western in May (presuming they’ll have us) when we’ll be returning to our traditional format. Keep your eyes peeled for more information about that. And for those of you interested in the tech side of how we pulled together a rudimentary hybrid event, it involved a Zoom account and two laptops (one to film the performers, the other so Emma could chat with folk online and ensure they felt part of the evening). And Steve stood in as MC while Dave rebuilds his back. While this doesn’t give us the facility to share work from online attendees (and we hope to work towards that) it’s a simple first step. If you run an event, and you’d like to chat to us about this in detail, drop us a line – we’re happy to share what little we know. Putting on events isn’t a competition, after all.
Finally, a quick word about food. The Great Western does incredible cheese and onion cobs, the size of small houses. While these aren’t yet an essential part of a poetry evening, we think they probably should be. If you tried one last night, you’ll know.
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!
We’ve been involved with Wolves Lit Fest since it first started, and it’s been joyous to watch it establish itself and go from strength to strength. As this year’s festival slips away into the rear view mirror, here’s our thoughts on it. This is going to be a long post, so make yourself a cuppa and settle in…
The 2025 festival built on the success of previous years, bringing loads of visitors here to enjoy our city, and giving those of us who live in Wolverhampton something they can be massively proud of. There was a perfect blend of events – big names to bring in the crowds, and plenty of opportunities for local creatives to get up behind the mic and share their work with the public, too. That’s massively important as far as we’re concerned – and we’ll talk more about that later. For now, here’s a review of all the stuff we enjoyed and curated over the last weekend…
Friday
Each year, well in advance of the festival, we recommend a headline poet we think would be a great addition to it. Then we leave them and the festival organisers to hammer out an agreement, and hope they can make it happen. This year, we’d suggested Hollie McNish – who is absolutely brilliant – and we were delighted that her Friday night show in the city’s Art Gallery sold out way before the festival weekend. There are few poets who can hold an audience of over 140 in the palm of their hand, but Hollie is definitely one. We laughed far more than poetry audiences normally do, and the queue for signed copies of Hollie’s book ‘Lobster’ stretched all the way back up the gallery stairs at the end of the night.
Saturday.
We’ve run a Fringe Room at Wolves Lit Fest for several years now. It started in the upstairs room of the Lych Gate, moved to the Purity Bar after the pandemic, and has now found its home in the Tilston at the city’s Arena Theatre. In the tradition of Fringe, the shows are free for the audience to come and watch, but they have to pay to leave. More accurately, they lob into the hat whatever they think the show was worth, with all the money going direct to the performer. We always put on five shows, each of them roughly fifty minutes long. It’s a full-on day, but it is absolutely worth it, and the audience numbers speak for themselves – the room was packed! Huge thanks to our performers Susan Murray, Naomi Paul, Robin Ince, Date Night (Autumn & Hannah), and Lee Nelson.
Those of you who were there will know that Robin asked for the money in his hat to go to a local charity. We have now donated all £225 to Base 25, who work with young people across Wolverhampton. Thank you, Robin.
At some point in the afternoon, Steve sloped off to MC the event for the poetry competition winners – and shortlisted poets – in the Arena’s main room (you can see videos of the winning poems here, if you haven’t already) Our thanks to all the poets who came along to this, and a special mention to Wolverhampton poet John Woodall, who read his 2nd prize poem and hotfooted it down to the Molineux to watch Wolves-Villla. The actions of a man who loves misery, we all thought. And how wonderfully wrong we were proved to be!*
With the Fringe Room wrapped up we just had time to head to a noodle bar for a bite to eat, and then it was time for Stars of Slam. One event; five brilliant poetry slam winners. This was an evening of poetry to savour – no headliner, just five excellent poets sharing equal billing – with a rapt audience thoroughly entertained from the first moment to the last. If you get the chance to see Ben Davis, Brenda Read-Brown, Prince Acquah, Morgan Birch, or Bradley Taylor wherever you live, we recommend you grab it with both hands.
We went home absolutely buzzing.
Sunday
This is always a quieter day for us (hallelujah!) but a really important one. We curate the Writers’ Hub at the city’s art gallery. It’s a really important part of the festival programme, giving dozens of local writers the opportunity to share their work in public. For some of them, it’s the first time they’ll have got up behind (or is it in front of?) a mic, and it’s always wonderful to see how doing that changes their perception of what they can do with their work and what’s possible for them. This year, ten different writers’ groups from across the city and beyond gathered together to share their work. That’s maybe ninety local writers actively participating in the city’s arts scene, from first timers like Tettenhall Writers (hope we see you again!) to veterans like Bridgnorth and Coachhouse Writers.
And then, in the blink of an eye, it was Sunday evening, and time to retire to the pub for the traditional –and much-needed – debrief. We’ve spent years perfecting that, too.
Now, for reading this far, a little bonus: over the past few months Emma’s been busy working with a choir in Shrewsbury (the Mere Singers) writing a poem on a subject they wanted, after which a composer turned it into a choral piece for the choir to sing. The poem and song were finally released today, and you can watch and listen to them here. Enjoy. These are utterly magnificent.
And finally….
*We’re not saying that the positive effect of Lit Fest is exactly why Wolves beat Villa 2-0 on Saturday evening, we’re just saying that any reasonable person would recognise the part the Lit Fest played.
Every now and then, Wolverhampton excels itself. In 1927, it was the first town in the country to install a set of automatic traffic lights (as any fule kno). But twenty years earlier, it had also caused something of a sensation in the world of art, when the town’s Art Gallery offered a solo exhibition to the painter Evelyn De Morgan. This was the first time a modern gallery had ever dedicated an exhibition to the work of a single female artist (honourable mention here to the gallery’s curator, JJ Brownsword, who had been so impressed by Evelyn’s paintings that he contacted her directly to ask her to lend her works to Wolverhampton – the rest, as they say, is history).
The city’s Art Gallery is currently re-creating this groundbreaking show. And it’s a belter. If you’ve an hour to two to spare at any point between now and March 9th next year, when the ‘Painted Dreams’ exhibition closes, you really should pay it a visit. We popped in today, and we were blown away. We can’t recommend it highly enough.
Which leads us seamlessly on to news of the poetry workshop we’ll be running – in conjunction with Wolverhampton Literature Festival – on Sunday December 1st. This will be a unique opportunity, with a very limited number of places, to create poems responding to Evelyn’s paintings, and we expect tickets to be snapped up fast. Get yours here.
Having seen the exhibition, we’re more excited than ever to be leading this one-off, never-to-be-repeated event, celebrating Wolverhampton’s foresight in giving Evelyn the solo exhibition she so richly deserved all those years ago.
Tomorrow, we’re at BlackBerry Fair in Whitchurch. This is one of our favourite events of the year – we spend all day sitting on a sofa at the side of the high street, writing bespoke poems for folk who’ve come along to enjoy and take part in the festival. Over the years, we’ve written dozens: for grandparents and grandchildren, pet dogs and pirates. We can’t say how much we love this – although that love has been tested in years when the weather’s been a bit grim. We get to chat with so many fascinating people, and we never know what we’re going to be asked to write about next. It may not be every poet’s cup of tea, but it’s definitely ours! If you’re there, pop by and say hallo.
On Sunday afternoon we’re back in the West Midlands, at Caldmore Community Gardens in Walsall, running an open mic to celebrate nature (and National Poetry Day). Gracey Bee is our MC, it’s free to attend, it’ll be fun and friendly, and there may well be samosas. If you’ve a poem you want to read, or just want to come along and listen, you’ll be very welcome.
And once that’s finished, we hotfoot it over to Zoom for October’s Yes We Cant. Our headliner this month is Jonathan Humble, the man behind Dirigible Balloon, and our ‘Alf Ender is Ash Bainbridge. All the open mic spots have been filled already, but there’s still time to join our audience. Get in touch if you fancy curling up on your sofa with some great poetry to round off your weekend.
Yes We Cant, for those of you who don’t know – and yes, it’s cant without the apostrophe, cant as in natter or blather or chat – is our long-running poetry night. Held on the first Sunday of the month, originally in the Pretty Bricks pub in Walsall, then moving online during the pandemic. It’s stayed online since then, partly because we built up a loyal audience of folk who wouldn’t necessarily be able to make it to a physical event, and partly because we haven’t yet found a venue which meets all our needs about accessibility, cost, and the facility for us to host a hybrid poetry night which can be attended by folk in both the real and the virtual world.
At each Yes We Cant we have ten open-mic poets (a strict four minutes each), an ‘Alf Ender (a poet who’s recently had a collection of their work published) and a headline poet (who’s, er, the headliner). And over the years we’ve put on some of the very biggest and best names in UK poetry while creating a friendly, welcoming, pay-as-you-feel space for poets and audience alike.
All this preamble is by way of letting you know that the next Yes We Cant is on Sunday October 6th, on Zoom, at 7.30pm. Our headliner is Jonathan Humble, the force behind Dirigible Balloon; our ‘Alf Ender is Ash Bainbridge; there are ten open mic spots waiting to be claimed. As always, first dibs on those go to folk who’ve never read with us before, or haven’t read at Yes We Cant for a while. Get in touch if you’d like to read, or if you simply want to join our audience.
And there’ll be a half-time video of something obscure and wonderful, courtesy of our very own Dave Pitt. What’s not to like, folks? What’s not to like?
Many years ago, when the world was still young [2018: ed] we found ourselves looking for an easily accessible listing of West Midlands poetry events, with all the necessary details for folk who might be interested in going along to them, and found… nothing. So we decided to do something about it, and – being cheeky wee scraps – we created our very own Mappa Mundi, listing all the events and venues we could. We still believe that in doing so, we corrected the appalling oversight in the original Hereford map, which – for all its qualities – is next to useless for poets.
Then Covid happened, live poetry took something of a back seat, and the need for our Mappa Mundi fell away. We put it in the back of a dusty cyber-drawer, and forgot about it. Almost. Finding ourselves with a little time on our hands this summer, we unrolled it, laid it out on a table, and set about updating it. It turns out that some of the poetry nights from our 2018 map are still flourishing. Others have disappeared. And there are a fair few new kids on the block, too, as the regional poetry scene evolves and changes, ebbs and flows.
You’ll find all of them here https://pandemonialists.co.uk/mappa-mundi/ There’s the wonderful image designed by artist Catherine Pascall Moore, which tips its hat at the Hereford Mappa, while all the poetry and spoken word events are on a slightly more modern and tech-friendly Google map. We’ve included nights which lie just outside the West Mids county too, because why not? Who wouldn’t fancy a trip to Worcester, or Ironbridge, or Hinckley to listen to poetry once in a while? And if you run a regular event we don’t know of, get in touch and we’ll add it to the listing.
The poets list on the map? We know that’s not up to date. And we’ll get round to revamping that at some point. But for now, use this list of events to get out there, listen to poetry, share your own, meet people, and keep this regional, grassroots arts scene thriving.
