upcoming - poetry emergency 23-24 nov

Advance notice that on Friday and Saturday 23-24 November this year Joey Frances and Nia Davies have organised Poetry Emergency: a north west radical poetry festival.

Their description of the event says it's:

"a two-day festival exploring emergency and liveness in radical poetic art, [...] Bringing together some of the most challenging and surprising poets and performers of the moment, we ask how poetic art can intervene against passivity and fear in order to agitate and inspire. In the emergency-prone moment of anxiety and disaster-creation, how can the mini-revolutions of language art snowball into communities of support and resistance? Crossing between poetry readings and performance, and integrating workshops and discussions into the programme, Poetry Emergency will be a rare and exciting creative and learning event for the North West."

I'd be heading along to check it out anyway, but as it happens I'll be making sounds on the Saturday, so I've no excuse for missing it now.

But there are also some really excellent people performing. Links are below. Before that though:

Friday 23 November is at Salford University, New Adelphi Studio Theatre, M5 4WT, and is a day of workshops, seminars & discussion, followed by an evening of performance.

Saturday 24 November is at 70 Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5NH. That's the Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) building that used to be Cornerhouse. Saturday is a day of poetry and poetry-adjacent performance

Line-up so far is  genuinely pretty exciting and includes:

Maggie O’Sullivan
Sean Bonney
Danny Hayward
Lila Matsumuto
Rhys Trimble
Nisha Ramayya
Nathan Walker
Nicola Singh
Claire Potter
Amy McCauley
Tear Fet (that's me!)
Food People
de facto displays of slogans & snippets contributed by Bhanu Kapil
and more to be confirmed...

MMU Special Collections will also have displays of poetry books and pamphlets available to view in their reading room on the Saturday afternoon.

So you can get more information and keep up-to-date with new announcements on Facebook and on Twatter. There's also a Wordpress page, but there doesn't appear to be much there yet.

I hope you're excited for this. You bloody well ought to be. See you there.