Verve Poetry & Spoken Word Festival

Verve Poetry & Spoken Word Festival Festival of Poetry & Spoken Word ✨Back 7-10 MAY 2026✨ and online✨ Online Multi-press Poetry-only Bookshop

Sarah Howe Workshop - In Place of MemoryIf memory’s entanglements and evasions make it a shaky basis for knowledge, wher...
04/12/2025

Sarah Howe Workshop - In Place of Memory

If memory’s entanglements and evasions make it a shaky basis for knowledge, where does that leave our sense of our selves? Opening up our writing to memory’s inevitable distortions can be destabilising at first, but also freeing: whether as individuals, families or nations, how might writing poems help us to understand our pasts? In our efforts to process past experience, where does truth meet belief? By reading some contemporary poets who make a study in their work of the mechanisms of remembering and revelation, along with some easy exercises, we’ll generate some early drafts and reach towards fresh ways of making poems.

Tue, 3 Mar, 19:00
From £19.67
Book here:www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sarah-howe-workshop-in-place-of-memory-tickets-1857526875889?aff=oddtdtcreator

NB Zoom links to the individual workshops will arrive in your inbox 48 hours before each workshop. Please check your junk folder.

Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia, won an Eric Gregory Award, and her first collection, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In 2014, she co-founded Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism. She is currently the Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool. Her most recent collection is Foretokens (Chatto, 2025)

Little bonus for our poetry community. As you may have seen we’ve launched POEM OF THE FESTIVAL calling for poetry submi...
03/12/2025

Little bonus for our poetry community. As you may have seen we’ve launched POEM OF THE FESTIVAL calling for poetry submissions on the theme of LOVE.

Fridays writing hour will look at poems on this theme to inspire your writing.

Writing Hour. Friday 5th December. 10am.
£10 to join as a one off or £3.50 a month via Substack.

See you there x

03/12/2025

We Write Here.

VERVE FOR LIFE: YOU BELONG HERE. For the first time, we’re opening VERVE FOR LIFE to a limited group of supporters who w...
02/12/2025

VERVE FOR LIFE: YOU BELONG HERE.

For the first time, we’re opening VERVE FOR LIFE to a limited group of supporters who want to stay connected to VERVE—always.

We’re opening VERVE FOR LIFE to a limited group of 100 Lifetime Members. Join with a single £100 payment and stay part of our community for life.

This membership is our way of honouring the people who believe in what we’re building: a festival that celebrates poetry in all its forms, a community that is welcoming, caring, accessible, and creatively alive. Your one-off contribution helps us stay sustainable in uncertain times while continuing to offer free and low-cost poetry opportunities across Birmingham and beyond.

As a Lifetime Member, you’ll receive:

• 10% off festival tickets, workshops, competitions & books—for life
• A one-week head start on festival and workshop booking
• Exclusive offers and members’ perks throughout the year
• Twice-yearly members’ meetings
• A numbered membership card and exclusive VERVE pin badge
• And most of all: a lifelong place in our VERVE community

Membership opens 1st December 2025 and is strictly limited to 100 people. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

If VERVE has ever given you energy, creative connection, a sense of home, or a doorway into poetry—you’re warmly invited to become part of VERVE FOR LIFE.

Thank you for being here. We’re nothing without you.

Marjorie Lotfi Workshop - Writing the GenerationsFeb 17 from 7pm to 9pm GMTDuring the workshop, we'll consider how a num...
01/12/2025

Marjorie Lotfi Workshop - Writing the Generations
Feb 17 from 7pm to 9pm GMT

During the workshop, we'll consider how a number of contemporary poets tackle writing about ancestors and themselves in the context of family. We'll then use those examples to spark a number of pieces of new writing.

Book Here:
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/marjorie-lotfi-workshop-writing-the-generations-tickets-1857355142229?aff=oddtdtcreator

Marjorie Lotfi is the author of The Wrong Person to Ask (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), which won the 2024 Forward Prize for Best First Collection and a James Berry Award. It was also shortlisted for the Saltire Prize for Best Book of Poetry and was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Marjorie’s a member of the Royal Literary Fund’s Writer’sMosaic.

Marjorie’s poetry has been published widely, including on London’s Poems on the Underground. She leads a weekly short workshop, Marjorie’s Table, via Substack, and offers tutored writing retreats at Galloway House Estate on Scotland’s south-west coast.

NB Zoom links to the individual workshops will arrive in your inbox 48 hours before each workshop. Please check your junk folder.

*ANNOUNCEMENT* POEM OF THE FESTIVAL is live. Submissions are now open for our annual POEM OF THE FESTIVAL competition.Ea...
01/12/2025

*ANNOUNCEMENT* POEM OF THE FESTIVAL is live.

Submissions are now open for our annual POEM OF THE FESTIVAL competition.

Each year, we invite poets of all backgrounds to write the poem that will stand at the heart of VERVE 2026 — a piece that celebrates our community, our creativity, and the voices that make this festival what it is.

This year’s theme is LOVE in all its messy, radical, tender, destructive, platonic, self-affirming, chaotic, sustaining forms.
All love, any love. Love like you mean it.

Judged by the brilliant Victoria Kennefick, this competition is open to adults and young people aged 11–17.
Submissions open 1 December and close 20 January.

Thank you to everyone who continues to write with us, submit to us, and shape this festival with your courage, craft and curiosity. We can’t wait to read your work.

Full details at vervepoetryfestival.com

NOVEMBER POEMS OF THE MONTHEAT was the theme for this Poem of the Month. Plates of smooth and sweet, delectable and deni...
28/11/2025

NOVEMBER POEMS OF THE MONTH

EAT was the theme for this Poem of the Month. Plates of smooth and sweet, delectable and denied, give-in-to-guilt delight, culturally prohibited and tender poetry lay on our submissions table, and we consumed them with great pleasure.

What excited us about this month’s winner, Bulimia as Viral Sensation by Naoise Gale, was — in Stuart’s words — “its original take on the theme of EAT and its cascade of bold and dynamic imagery.”

The shortlisted poems also challenge the chew. These poems on eating are less about food and more about relationships and social connections.

Congratulations to all the poets behind the selected poems. We hope you have a feast with these. (All published over on Substack)

THE WINNING POEM

Bulimia as Viral Sensation — Naoise Gale

THE SHORTLIST

the rules of the marshmallow experiment — Julie Runacresindigestion — Liam BatesRaised on the tail-end of he**in chic — Abbie DayCut Scenes — Suyin Du BoisEverything Ice Cream — Liz Lefroy

Victoria Kennefick Workshop - The Tyranny of TimeTime and Tide Wait for no man: The tyranny of time and the punctuality ...
27/11/2025

Victoria Kennefick Workshop - The Tyranny of Time

Time and Tide Wait for no man: The tyranny of time and the punctuality of poetry.

As Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in the Prologue to the Clerk’s Tale (circa 1395), “time and tide wait for no man” and though so much of our human experience has altered irrevocably in the hundreds of intervening years, this aspect of being a mortal, biological entity remains unchanged.

Given this is the case, how do we as poets grapple with time, space and place in our work?

Can we truly create a poetry machine that is specific to our experience but also timeless?

What makes a poem like Chaucer’s transcend the boundaries of time?

Join poet Victoria Kennefick for this course which will explore the possibilities and power of writing with, through and about time. We’ll read work by marion eames white, Shireen Madon and Cynthia Cruz among others and use these to write our own poetic timepieces – poems that are neither early nor late, but always right on time.

Tue, 10 Feb, 19:00
From £19.67
Book here:
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/victoria-kennefick-workshop-the-tyranny-of-time-tickets-1857319445459?aff=oddtdtcreator

NB Zoom links to the individual workshops will arrive in your inbox 48 hours before each workshop. Please check your junk folder.

Victoria Kennefick’s second collection Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024) is a Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2024. Her debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize and the Butler Literary Prize. She has been appointed Cork County Council Writer-in-Residence 2024.

Victoria Kennefick hosts a poetry workshop over Zoom.

November’s POTM is closed! Another incredible month of poems submitted on the theme EAT.Our shortlisted and winning poem...
21/11/2025

November’s POTM is closed!

Another incredible month of poems submitted on the theme EAT.Our shortlisted and winning poems will be released on the 27th.

Thank you all for your submissions.

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