There have been some incredibly tasty helpings of PASTA over the years, and last night’s was up there with the best of them. It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that a room packed with poets had plenty to say on our first-half theme of ‘sheer unspeakable strangeness’ but, if we’d ever been minded to question their enthusiasm and collective skill before the night started, our doubts would have been well and truly put to bed by the interval, when everyone in the room caught our breath and marvelled at what we’d just heard.
We started with musings on Why are we here? Where is here anyway? and moved on via the. duck-billed platypus, Oliver Sachs, grief, men staring at goats, bizarre bus journeys (though not men staring at goats on bizarre bus journeys), pizza toppings, odd friends, psychedelics, the mystery of class, and more. We heard from old friends and new voices, and were treated to comic poems, serious pieces, and everything in between. Each of them was a joy to listen to. Bravo, one and all!
The second half was every bit as good, by the way. But the first half… wow!
If you were there Tuesday night and enjoyed the evening (and why wouldn’t you?) or if this review has piqued your interest and you fancy popping along to one of the West Mids’ friendliest open mic nights, then the next helping of PASTA is in the Arena Theatre on Tuesday May 19th, when the first-half theme will be ‘setting the world on fire’. Please leave matches and accelerants at the door.
Before that date, we’ve two other excellent events for your delectation and delight.
On Sunday May 3rd, Yes We Cant brings headliner Andrea Mbarushimana (Coventry poet laureate) and ‘Alf Ender David Calcutt to our new venue at the Lych Gate Tavern in Wolverhampton city centre, with ten open mic poets completing the line-up (five slots bookable in advance, five on the door on the night). Please note that this will be a purely in-person event – Yes We Cant will be alternating between purely in-person and purely online events from here on, so June’s event will be on Zoom.
On May 12th we’re back at the Arena Theatre once more with Arena Nights, where we bring a full-length Fringe show to Wolverhampton. In May, this will be Rachel Sambrooks’ show Phoenixing. The audience will also be treated to a ten-minute excerpt from a work in progress, with an opportunity to give feedback (one of the unique elements of this night), and there are open-mic slots for anyone delivering their piece from memory. This is a PAYF event, with all donations going to the headline act, and it’s well worth putting in your diary.
Last Saturday, in conjunction with Birmingham & Black Country Wildlife Trust, Emma and Steve ran a poetry ‘walkshop’ around Fibbersley Nature Reserve in Willenhall, on the western edge of Walsall Borough. The walk was originally meant to take place in January of this year, but heavy snowfall and freezing temperatures then – and a lack of available dates after that – meant it was re-arranged for the end of March.
This turned out to be a blessing. The sun shone, there was blossom on the trees, and much of the reserve’s birdlife was announcing its presence (and claiming breeding territories) in song. Our diverse group of more than twenty writers, birders, walkers took a stroll through the reserve, we took time to pay attention to what we could see and hear, made use of the Merlin and iNaturalist apps to help identify what we were looking at or listening to… and heard blue tits, great tits, jays, chiffchaff, wren, and goldcrest among others. En route we also shared some nature poems, and took the opportunity to write some haiku in our various mother tongues, including Black Country, Japanese, and Persian. These were then written up on leaf-shaped pieces of paper and attached with twine to a poet-tree in the reserve (this was intended to stay up for a week, and we’ll be going along in the next few days to take them all down).
Walk completed, we made our way to Willenhall Memorial Park Pavilion for tea, coffee, and biscuits, learned about local projects aimed at boosting numbers of swifts, had the opportunity to have a go at some more creative activities, chatted with Wildlife Trust officers about how we think nature in Walsall could be boosted, and contributed to a group poem (reproduced below) before heading our separate ways after a wonderfully enjoyable morning.
People attended the ‘walkshop’ from all over Walsall, and some had even taken advantage of Willenhall’s brand-new railway station to come in from Birmingham! Our thanks to Birmingham & Black Country Wildlife Trust for funding the event, and to everyone who came along to take part and enjoy a wander round one of Walsall’s finest nature reserves. If you missed out, try and make time to have a wander over Fibbersley if you’re in the area – it’s a gem of a reserve.
Fibbersley Local Nature Reserve
Fibbersley is bullace blossom ushering in the Spring it’s forsythia in bloom, and comfrey creeping
it’s hawthorn and blackthorn and alder and beech Fibbersley’s a pond full of frogspawn just out of reach
Fibbersley is robins and blue tits and bullfinch and wren it’s the chiffchaff who fly here from Africa when
the days start getting longer and the first leaves appear it’s the goldcrest and greenfinch you can’t spy but can hear
Fibbersley’s the call of the buzzard high up in the sky it’s the newts in the ponds as the walkers stroll by
Fibbersley’s the silence of fishermen casting for bream it’s the meditation of poets who sit here and dream
Fibbersley is rain hitting water, it’s wind in the trees it’s the barking of foxes, the buzzing of bees
it’s badgers at night, it’s owls hunting for voles it’s nature reclaiming where men once dug coal
Fibbersley’s open to all, and it’s Willenhall’s gem come down and enjoy it, and then come back again.
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.
