MAKE POETRY WEIRD AGAIN

About MAKE POETRY WEIRD AGAIN

a poetry experiment by nols nathanski. poetry to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. an experimental queer poetry podcast where poems are made and performed automatically, pushing the boundaries of the form. each episode: a conversation with a poet, three timed automatic writing prompts done live - guest and nols both and then the open mic. no editing. no polish. just the poems that arrive. we close every show the same way: a shout out, the name of a collection a poet haven't written yet, and words of wisdom about fifty minutes is always planned - but neurodivergence does what is does. send us your poems innit

Publisher

Nols Nathankski

Category

arts · education · religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

29 Jul 2025

Latest episode

13 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

88 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   13 Sept 2026

   HOW TO MAKE A POETRY FESTIVAL FROM THE DEPTHS

   Nols Nathankski takes an hour away from festival organising to talk you through what to expect from the Hold Space Poetry Festival 1-5th October 2026 in the Crypt Gallery. The Crypt Gallery sits under St Pancras New Church on Euston Road. It was a burial ground until 1854 and an air raid shelter in the war, and 557 people are still down there. From 1 to 5 October it is also a poetry festival. Hold Space: From the Depths is the second edition, after seven sold-out nights in Holy Week this April that produced a zine assembled overnight. This one goes further down. Twelve resident poets have the run of the crypt for five days, writing in it, recording in it, and performing in the evening work that did not exist that morning. The residency is not a retreat. It is an exposure. In this episode we go into the stone and find out what it does to a poem. What happens to your line breaks when the room is cold, the light is bad and the audience is partly dead. Why a church let a queer poetry organisation in. What it costs to run a festival the Arts Council turned down and the public paid for instead. ============================================================== THE SCHEDULE ============================================================== The crypt is open 10am to 6pm daily. Workshops and the open mic are separately ticketed. Featured poets open each open mic, two or three a night, before the floor goes to fourteen. THURSDAY 1 OCTOBER 10am Crypt opens · residency begins · set-up and intentions 3pm Penance Poetry Workshop (3 to 5pm) 3pm The Sacred Space Within (3 to 5pm) 6pm Open mic in the crypt Featured: Kristal Sisodia · Valera Simonchuk · H FRIDAY 2 OCTOBER 10am Crypt opens · residency · podcast recordings 6pm Open mic in the crypt Featured: Byuka Makodru · Nols Nathankski · Luigi Coppola SATURDAY 3 OCTOBER 10am Crypt opens · residency · live podcast recordings · Zine Day 1pm Trash Fire Poetry: Writing From The Ashes (1 to 3pm) 3pm Disasterpieces (3 to 5pm) 6pm THE GATHERING, upstairs in St Pancras New Church (6 to 9pm) Featured: Maddy Kilsby-McMurray · Emma Keun World premiere from Neil Bartlett OBE. No open mic in the crypt tonight. SUNDAY 4 OCTOBER 10am Crypt opens · residency · podcast recordings 11am Protest Poetry: Defamiliarising Violence (11am to 1pm) 1pm Saying The Unsayable (1 to 3pm) 6pm Open mic in the crypt Featured: Dr Maria Cohut · Pia Fajelagutan · Bee Wylie MONDAY 5 OCTOBER 10am Crypt opens · closing day · podcast recording · zine assembly 11am Rediscovering Joy In A Crypt (11am to 1pm) 3pm Penance Poetry Workshop (3 to 5pm) 5pm Stevie's Scary Stories Sharing Circle (5 to 7pm) 6pm Closing open mic in the crypt Featured: Stevie Grant · Alice Border · Tom Bland Zine launch and distribution at the close. ============================================================== THE WORKSHOPS ============================================================== All separately ticketed, all pay what you can, all small. Book individually. PENANCE POETRY WORKSHOP Thursday 1 October, 3 to 5pm · and Monday 5 October, 3 to 5pm Facilitated by Nols Nathankski Seven poets produce automatic poetry under deliberately restricted conditions. Over two hours, participants respond to three minute prompts and immediately perform their poems to the crypt. Poets are limited to pen, paper and water. Choosing to use a phone, drink alcohol, smoke or otherwise distract oneself results in becoming an audience member. None have failed yet. No photography or filming. Since its inception PENANCE has generated over 200 poems performed by more than 30 poets. THE SACRED SPACE WITHIN Thursday 1 October, 3 to 5pm Facilitated by Kristal Sisodia A meditative, poetic, psychedelic journey through sound, body and collective writing. Poetry becomes ritual, sound becomes language, and the body becomes a place to listen. Kristal works with singing, live instruments, loop station, meditation and collective writing, asking where poetry comes from, where it lives in our bodies, and who gets to have access to it. Bring a notebook and comfortable clothes you can move in. Nothing needs preparing. REDISCOVERING JOY IN A CRYPT Friday 2 October, 11am to 1pm Facilitated by Alice Border As light and frothy as you can get running a workshop in a crypt. Expect to write and discuss poetry that takes your ideas somewhere bizarre, somewhere funny, somewhere surreal, and almost certainly somewhere weird. TRASH FIRE POETRY: WRITING FROM THE ASHES Saturday 3 October, 1 to 3pm Facilitated by Maddy Kilsby-McMurray A new kind of writing circle, for unblocking your practice. After an initial prompt the poets make a new piece of work. Each is invited to share it, then destroy it. The scraps are combined and used to make the next pieces. Challenge the limits of inspiration and learn to tease new work from the ashes of what came before. Up to 15 writers, all levels. DISASTERPIECES Saturday 3 October, 3 to 5pm Facilitated by Emma Keun The world is ending, so come and make a disaster piece. Disasterpiece: disaster plus masterpiece, a work so ignominious it gains a cult following. Emma uses the term against the zeitgeist of disaster and collapse that permeates the 21st century. Apocalyptic poetry, made underground. 15 spaces. Dress for a cold tomb, bring a pen and a notebook. PROTEST POETRY: DEFAMILIARISING VIOLENCE Sunday 4 October, 11am to 1pm Facilitated by Dr Maria Cohut Turning anger into poetry, and poetry into an act of protest. What makes a poem a protest poem? When violence becomes everyday, banal even, how do we push back against that banalisation through the written and spoken word? Maria works through examples from the slam and spoken word scene and from classic and contemporary page poetry, with guided exercises drawn from Viktor Shklovsky's concept of defamiliarisation. Optional sharing. No experience needed. SAYING THE UNSAYABLE Sunday 4 October, 1 to 3pm Some losses resist language. Grief crouches in the body before it reaches the tongue. An intimate workshop for twelve poets on grief and loss, through generative writing, close reading and honest conversation, with the crypt itself part of the work. Anchor poems by writers who have found form for the formless, craft techniques for writing at the edge of language, two extended writing blocks, and a closing circle for optional sharing. Group size kept to twelve for depth and trust. STEVIE'S SCARY STORIES SHARING CIRCLE Monday 5 October, 5 to 7pm Facilitated by Stevie Grant Something wicked this way comes. A circle, not a class. Bring a scary story: one you wrote, one you love, one that has lived rent free in your head since childhood. Read aloud in candlelight, shiver together, and talk about what makes a story genuinely frightening and why writers have always been drawn to the dark. No experience necessary. Just bring something that scares you. ============================================================== THE TWELVE RESIDENTS ============================================================== PIA FAJELAGUTAN (she/her) Better known in the literary shadows as Liethers, or The Piss I Call Art, Pia is an Abu Dhabi-bred word wrangler and left-handed illustrator who turned childhood scribbles into a full-blown pen name rebellion. By day she hunts talent in the skies, the aviation world's secret poet. By night, or whenever the caffeine is strong enough, she brews free verse at open mics, prose, and eccentric illustrations that wrestle with identity, wanderlust and the occasional existential hangover. She is the author of the delightfully unhinged debut Whiskey For The Uninitiated, five years of identity crises, road dust and self-drawn chaos, and a multilingual poet who firmly believes the best poetry sneaks in when you are supposed to be adulting. Liethers does not do polished. She does unfiltered, with a side of feral charm. EMMA KEUN (she/her) Emma Keun lives in London. She is published in Kite String II, III and IV, anthologies for the open mic and poetry community, and in Word Space. She has four honourable mentions from Dark Poets Club and one highly commended from Creative Writing Ink. When not performing or writing she attempts building, sculpting or growing things. LUIGI COPPOLA (he/him) Poetry, music, rum and coke. Luigi has featured at Glastonbury Festival, Tate Modern, Greenwich Theatre, Koestler Arts, the Cutty Sark and the Southbank Centre's New Poets Collective. He is a Poetry Archive Worldview winner, Bridport shortlisted, Ledbury and National longlisted, and Lost Souls and Farrago Slam Champion. He makes music as The Only Emperor, and his debut comes from Broken Sleep Books. linktr.ee/PoetryPreacher DR MARIA COHUT (she/they) Maria is a Romanian writer living in Brighton with her ever-growing family of Giant African Land Snails, Madagascan hissing cockroaches and stick insects. Her writing is haunted by questions of identity, belonging, displacement, and what makes us human. It appears in many online and print publications, including the Borders & Belonging anthology (Cephalopress, 2022), The Hyacinth Review, The Hellebore, and The Other Side of Hope: Journeys in Refugee and Immigrant Literature, and has aired on radio. Her first chapbook, Spatter Pattern (back room poetry, 2023), explored gender-based violence by reimagining detective fiction tropes. Multiple Exposures (Flight of the Dragonfly, 2026) is her first full-length collection, reflecting on becoming uprooted, writing in an adopted language, and healing fractured identities. MADDY KILSBY-McMURRAY (they/them) Maddy is a non-binary poet and writer involved with a number of local creative and LGBTQIA+ groups. They are a neurodiversity advocate and regularly host talks sharing their lived experience as an ADHD-er. They volunteer with BCS, working to improve the tech industry as a whole. BEE WYLIE (she/her/bee) Bee is a weird little witchy word smith from the West Midlands. She has been writing poetry since around 2016 and performing spoken word on the London scene since 2021, and is a regular at the Word Zoo. She is currently illustrating her debut book, Dream Weaving, due to be published through Hay House: a collection of her earlier work, focused on spirituality, reincarnation, grief, the raw nature of love, and finding light in dark places. She is heavily influenced by her late mother Louise Wylie, a renowned psychic medium and spiritual teacher who taught Writing with Spirit at The College of Psychic Studies. TOM BLAND (he/him) Tom's first collection and verse novel, Camp Fear, was published by Bad Betty Press in 2021 and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize in 2022. The book fuses poetry with satire, surrealism and psychoanalysis, calling on Freud, Artaud and Acker, 4chan and Lana Del Rey, and inviting the reader into the dark corners of the human psyche. STEVIE GRANT (he/him) Queer Hackney poet, working in the long queer tradition of gothic writing. He closes the festival with a sharing circle for stories that frighten, held in candlelight in the crypt. @steviepoems KRISTAL SISODIA (they/them) Actor and poet. Kristal weaves voice, rhythm and sound together to guide people into a deeper relationship with their words, bodies and stories, working with singing, live instruments, loop station and meditation. Their practice treats poetry as ritual and the body as a place to listen. ALICE BORDER (she/her) Slam-winning performance poet in London and part of the Make Poetry Weird Again collective. She has headlined everywhere from Somerset House to the Divine Fringe, and her work has been published by WriteLondon, Crunch and Edition. Key pieces include The Unsolicited Shit Pic and An Ode To Billingsgate Fish Market. Her debut pamphlet, Taste Me, is published in October. @alicesayingstuff H (she/her) After years of only writing therapeutically, H mysteriously started writing and performing poetry in early 2025. She revels in surreal social satire, weaving humour and sadness, language experiments and characters. She likes to express her tranquilised emotions, and the things she really wishes she had said at the time, to willing audiences. She has been published in three anthologies: Surrey Poet Laureate, Lost Souls, and Forge Press' An Anthology Against Hate. She goes by H because she does not really like her name. Yes, she has a poem about it. @haitch_speaks BYUKA MAKODRU (they/them) Byuka is a trans, disabled and migrant writer working across speculative fiction, experimental writing and poetry. Their practice spans immersive performance, ritual facilitation, visual art and publishing, tracing wordscapes through cross-medium world-building rooted in social justice, displacement, ancestrality, anti-colonialism, ecology and queerness. Their poetry performance work has been shared at Ugly Duck, House of Annetta, the Crypt Gallery, QUEERCIRCLE, Ubiskes3 in Lithuania and the Fringe Festival in Poland. In 2025 they facilitated workshops on poetry as spellcasting and created a deck of poetry oracles for the Burned House Horizon exhibition at Mimosa House, London. Their current practice explores psychogeography, deep listening, ritual and writing with ash, using the material as a portal between the living and the dead, and a channel to the lineages of witches, women and marginalised people burned at the stake. They connect to poetry as a tool for liberation and futuring. ============================================================== HEADLINE COMMISSION ============================================================== NEIL BARTLETT OBE Poet, novelist, theatre director and translator, and one of the defining figures of British queer culture. His work across four decades has consistently interrogated the relationship between queer history, form, and the body politic. He gives the world premiere of a new commission in St Pancras New Church on Saturday 3 October, surrounded by sixteen queer poets and four musicians. The church is carried on caryatids, stone figures holding the roof up with their own bodies, so we gave him some of his own. ============================================================== COME DOWN ============================================================== Hold Space: From the Depths · 1 to 5 October 2026 The Crypt Gallery, 165 Euston Road, London NW1 2BA Part of Bloomsbury Festival 2026, its 20th anniversary year Day ticket to the crypt, 10am to 6pm, pay what you can to £11 Workshops, separately ticketed, pay what you can Open mic every evening, separately ticketed The Gathering, Saturday 3 October, pay what you can to £10 Everything: outsavvy.com/organiser/make-poetry-weird-again ACCESS The crypt is reached by a staircase and there is no step-free access. The Gathering, in the church above, is step free. The crypt is underground and stone built and it is cold. Bring layers. Anything at all, email nols@makepoetryweirdagain.com and we will be honest with you about what the building can and cannot do. CREDITS Make Poetry Weird Again is made by Nols Nathankski. Recorded live in The Crypt Gallery. @makepoetryweirdagain · nols@makepoetryweirdagain.com TAGS poetry · spoken word · queer · london · poetry festival · crypt · bloomsbury festival · neil bartlett · open mic · zine · workshops · make poetry weird again

2. 

   30 Aug 2026

   HOW TO MAKE POEMS ON A PODCAST NAKED

   This week Nols welcomes the poet, performer and filmmaker Ernesto Sarezale and, true to form, the whole conversation was recorded with both of them completely naked in Nols's living room. There's a lineage to that: Ginsberg's Howl gave us the "starving hysterical naked," and Ernesto's own film opens on the same lines. So the clothes came off, and what was left was the work, the body, and two people telling the truth to a microphone. Ernesto is a fixture of London's queer spoken word world. He runs regular open mics, writes across concrete poetry, flash fiction and erotica, works in English and en castellano, and made Queer Tongues a guerrilla-shot documentary feature charting today's queer spoken word scene through live snippets and interviews with more than 38 performers, on sexuality, poetry, performance and the politics of the body. It screened at Brighton & Hove Pride's Film Pride festival. In this episode Recording naked — what it does to a conversation, and why it belongs to the weird tradition Queer Tongues and the DIY heart of spoken word: the most accessible, affordable art form there is Making work across languages, forms and the erotic Ginsberg, Howl, and poetry as a voice for the underrepresented Building and holding open-mic community in London Find Ernesto Website: https://www.sarezale.com (https://www.sarezale.com) Queer Tongues (film): https://www.sarezale.com/queer-tongues.html (https://www.sarezale.com/queer-tongues.html) Trailer: https://vimeo.com/491771210 (https://vimeo.com/491771210) Open mics in London: http://www.sarezale.com/events (http://www.sarezale.com/events) Book & poems: https://www.sarezale.com/poems.html (https://www.sarezale.com/poems.html) Make Poetry Weird Again — poetry to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. Subscribe, share, and come find us at an event.

3. 

   17 Aug 2026

   HOW TO TAKE POETRY FROM THE LIBRARY TO THE CASTLE

   Nols Nathankski sits down with Adam de Salle. Adam will not call himself a poet. He introduces himself as a Senior Library Assistant and an open mic performer, and leaves it there. Other people say the word behind his back. He is a public librarian in south London, which he'll tell you is not a job about silence at all it's community work, and the last safety net for people falling through every other one. He runs his own open mic in a library and a castle. He's a fixture at Word Space, White Feather and our very own, Hold Space Open Mic. He came to writing through Burroughs and the cut-up, and he keeps Shakespeare, in his mouth the way other people keep their phone in their pocket. This episode was recorded while he was in the middle of a heartbreak, and he does not pretend otherwise. What comes out of it is the grief that only love can produce. Six poems, three three-minute written between them with prompts from @alicesayingstuff , and a lot of talk about libraries. Find Adam on instagram @adamdesalle Check out his open mic here -Events & Activities | Eltham Library | Better Libraries (https://www.better.org.uk/library/london/greenwich/eltham-library/whats-on) Adam will be at Hold Space Poetry festival from the 1-5th October 2026. To support the festival please donate at the link below FUND OUR QUEER POETRY FESTIVAL IN A CRYPT - a Creative & Arts crowdfunding project in London by Nols Nathankski (https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/fund-our-queer-poetry-festival-in-a-crypt)

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