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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.

As the cool wind of Winter starts to give way to Spring we had our next helping of PASTA and the theme… well the theme was farts. Don’t let anyone tell you getting your audience to decide the theme for the following month is a good idea. We’re just amazed it took this long before such a theme was “let loose”.

Once Dave and Emma had got the microphone working it wasn’t surprising to find a lot of people had guff themed works. We had farty pants grans, a Bachelor of Farts and were even invited to the Welsh Coast where we could stand with our back to the sea and trump at Trump. It was also nice to see the storytellers come out in force. We were presented with a snippet of a show (or a waft of a fart if you prefer) which referenced Mad Max, Meat Loaf and Phil Taylor. Along with the line, “The vindaloo has helped free my third eye.”

We like to think the fact the back screen of the stage had the words, “Supported using public funding by the Arts Council England” projected on it was both a show of resistance and a surrender to our baser instincts.

The first half ended with a lovely story from Daisy Black. A tale of harvest, a plague and a strong woman dealing with the Devil and finding an ally in a flatus. Daisy has a show on at the Arena in April and we think you should see it.

“Anymore farts?” said Purshouse and fortunately, or unfortunately, there wasn’t. At least none anyone admitted to.

After the interval we dived into the second half with a poem about ethics which included the killer line, “Values are what remains when we’re triggered.” We also had more storytelling including a lovely piece about the writer’s mom who was suffering from Cancer.

Witty, heartfelt and we have no doubt plenty of us know women who can show such strength and humour against adversity. These little snippets of prose go down well at these nights so if you have anything you’d like to try pop along. We then had more lovely poems on spiritual excess, dreams and then just in case you missed what happened in the first half a piece about uncontrollable gas.

We picked the theme for next month which is “Sheer Unspeakable Strangeness” and can only hope people don’t reuse their fart poems. Oh, reusing farts… that’s not a healthy.

Please don’t do that but do pop along next month and speak your unspeakable strangeness.

The dust had barely settled on Wolverhampton Literature Festival, but the creative energy in the city wasn’t ready to dim just yet. This past Tuesday, February 10th, we hosted another Arena Nights. If the Literature Festival was the feast, Arena Nights was the perfect digestif. 

The night opened with three performers taking the stage to test their mettle (and their memory) by performing works-in-progress. We heard of a better world, a story which was not about a stone and Red Emma.

Before the interval, we were treated to a 10-minute snippet of An Evening With Gareth Evans, a work-in-progress by Kerry Frater. Though we only saw two of the nine intended scenes, the impact was immediate.

The play introduces us to Wales’ first movie star, Gareth Evans. A man who feels profoundly out of place as he navigates a world that doesn’t quite know what to do with him. Kerri’s writing hints at a character layered with secrets, leaving the audience with a desperate need to see the full picture. You could tell a performance was successful when half the audience spent the interval Googling “Gareth Evans.” The intrigue is officially sparked.

The second half belonged to Maya Catherine Foster and her stellar piece, Lullabies and Love Stories.

This is theatre at its most evocative. Foster deconstructs the treatment of female characters in traditional folklore, weaving together storytelling and song with a linguistic richness that is rare to find. While the tone is often dark, the “well-placed splashes of humour” prevented the weight from becoming overbearing, instead making the sharper edges of the stories cut even deeper.

In a world of “heroic” narratives that often leave women in the margins, Foster’s work feels like a necessary reclamation. “I care for girls that heroes will discard.” Foster proclaims at one point. And shouldn’t we all.

It’s Monday afternoon, and we’re looking back – bleary-eyed – at a packed weekend of events at Wolves Lit Fest. It’s fair to say we’ve a real sense of wonder about just how good it was once again. And alongside that, there’s a considerable amount of exhaustion – ideally, the pandemonialists would be writing this blog curled under their respective duvets, but the world isn’t like that, and we’ve been travelling the West Midlands/doing IT/slogging through admin since first thing this morning.

Anyway, them’s the breaks. Let’s talk about how good Lit Fest was! As always, there was oodles of stuff we never got the opportunity to see, but there was a fair amount we were closely involved in and chuffed to bits to put on. On Saturday, we curated the Fringe Room in the Arena Theatre: five Fringe shows performed to an appreciative audience, each of them pay-as-you-feel (with all the money going direct to the artist).

First up was Melanie Branton with her show The Full English. We brought this up to Wolves in the summer, as part of Midlands Fringe, but it’s so good we had to bring it back, and we’re very glad we did. Catch it if you can!

Rob Kemp should have been next, with his show Beatlesjuice, but he was unable to make it (get well soon, Rob!) so our very own Steve Pottinger stepped in with a debut performance of his show Sweat & Mugs & RocknRoll.

Emma slipped away to interview Kit de Waal in Wolverhampton’s Art Gallery, which meant she missed show number three – Cameroonian storyteller Charles Kouasseu, who soon had a packed theatre singing and dancing, despite the rain outside. Highly recommended.

Our fourth show was AngelaBra: diary of a bingo call girl which was a lot of fun, got everyone playing bingo, and we take our collective hats off to the audience members who lip-synced and danced to a disco classic in order to win their prize. You were ace!

And we closed with Still Raving in your 40s by Donald Jenkins, a full-on piece of physical theatre which took us into the heart of the lived experience of rave culture.

There was just time to grab a bite to eat before Stars of Slam, our annual poetry event in the Art Gallery which showcases the considerable talents of four slam-winning poets, and their incredible poetic voices. Stepping up to the mic this year were Clive Oseman, Charlotte Faulconbridge, Davina Songbird, and the winner of last year’s Wolves Lit Fest slam, David Braziel. And it was glorious!

We headed home, we got some sleep, we came back in bright and early on Sunday morning, and we spent the day curating the Writers’ Hub. This gives a platform to a host of local writers’ groups from across Wolverhampton, as well as groups from Walsall, Lichfield, and Stourbridge, and it’s a hugely important part of what the festival offers. Over the course of the day, we had almost 400 people come through the doors, to support friends, to listen, or to read their work.

Emma slipped away again, this time to give a sold-out reading from her latest collection Unsung (which is very very very very good) but was back in time to see new writing group Willenhall Writers share their work at the festival for the very first time. And if that isn’t part of what a literature festival should be doing, then we don’t know what is.

They closed the Writers’ Hub for 2026, we treated ourselves to a curry and an early night, and today is all about saying ‘thank you’ to the artists, audiences, and organisers who made this year’s festival such a success. It’s also about us recycling our blog titles because we’re tired, and hoping no-one notices. But we won’t mention that.

Wolves Lit Fest will be back in February 2027. Put the dates in your diary and we’ll see you there!

PPP
9th Feb 2026

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.

Steve Pottinger
4th February 2026

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

Our latest PASTA (Poets and Storytellers Assemble) open mic night at the Arena Theatre in Wolverhampton delivered another rich tapestry of voices mirroring the plentiful colours of autumn. That’s because falling leaves was the theme for the first half. While the theme suggests quiet contemplation, transition, and your ears getting cold, our performers, as always, used it as a springboard to dive into unexpected mounds of, well, fallen leaves.

Sure, we heard pieces exploring that transition from autumn to winter. Yet we also heard about “ghost trees,” and even a piece set in1960’s Cuba. Continuing the revolutionary theme of 1960’s Cuba, one poet decided to use a completely different set of stairs down to the stage. Every day it seems is a time for a new outlook on life. Kind of like falling leaves in autumn.

Following the break, the floor opened up for work on any theme, resulting in a fascinating collection of subjects and forms, addressing the misconception by some that vinyl records are just massive CDs, a poem with a devotional obsession to mushrooms, and a number of haiku (last month we famously had a haiku in the original Japanese; this month it was the turn of the moribund language of Latin to take centre stage in a poem – it all happens at PASTA).

We also had someone share work for the first time. More accurately, someone spoke publicly for the first time to share the work of another poet who was sharing for the first time. We don’t care how it happens – we’re just glad people are writing and sharing. The more people involved in that process and who get to discover the joys of creativity and sharing, the better.

Thanks to everyone who shared their work and contributed to this vibrant, intellectually engaging evening. The PASTA stage remains a place where any subject, from a falling leaf to a massive CD, can become poetry.

The theme for our next PASTA is “Creases” and it’s scheduled for Tuesday February 17th so you’ve got plenty of time to rustle something together.

Last night was the second run in of our new night at the Arena Theatre. Arena Nights is a PAYF event focused on learning performance pieces, showcasing new work, and is rounded off with the performance of a full fringe show, with all money collected on the night going to the headline artist.

After several poets dug into their noggin to recall and recite their work – including an excellent piece about a River Monster in the Tyne – we then had a 10-minute extract from Daron Carey’s play, “Last Orders.” This was a fantastic piece full of rich language and inventive metaphors. If you get a chance to see Daron’s work in full then remember, you only need one kidney. You can sell the other one.

After the interval, the main performance was John Biddulph’s show, Gallimaufry. The title reflects the content, which was a collection of poems and stories gathered throughout his professional life as a musician and psychologist. Highlights of the show, delivered with poise and warmth, included a poem that was both written and performed in Middle English, and a separate piece focused on the experience of tinnitus.

Next week we’re back at the Arena for the last PASTA of 2025. The dates for Arena Nights and PASTA in 2026 will be released shortly. So sign up to our newsletter to find those out. In the meantime, get some ten-minute sections of your new show ready, memorise a few poems, and maybe even polish off that script for the Fringe performance you’ve always promised yourself you’ll do, and we’ll see you in 2026.