MAKE POETRY WEIRD AGAIN

Nols Nathankski
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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

  1. 3d ago

    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

  2. Aug 30

    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 traditionQueer Tongues and the DIY heart of spoken word: the most accessible, affordable art form there isMaking work across languages, forms and the eroticGinsberg, Howl, and poetry as a voice for the underrepresentedBuilding and holding open-mic community in LondonFind Ernesto Website: https://www.sarezale.comQueer Tongues (film): https://www.sarezale.com/queer-tongues.htmlTrailer: https://vimeo.com/491771210Open mics in London: http://www.sarezale.com/eventsBook & poems: https://www.sarezale.com/poems.htmlMake Poetry Weird Again — poetry to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. Subscribe, share, and come find us at an event.

  3. Aug 17

    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 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

  4. Jul 31

    HOW TO MAKE CRYPTOLOGICAL POEMS FOR THE UNINITIATED

    Nols Nathanksi records underground, in the Crypt Gallery beneath St Pancras Church during HOLD SPACE POETRY FESTIVAL in April 2026, while the Euston Road went on with its own noise a few feet above our heads. We took the Holy Week prompts down with us and used them the way you use a spade. Seven days of betrayal, overturned tables, barren blossom trees, a body washed, a body waiting. Two poets who did not flinch at any of it. Byuka Makodru @fortunetailedbeast writes with ash and treats the page as a portal. Pia Fajelagutan writes under the name @ThePissICallArt and treats the page as somewhere to spill. Put them in a room built for the dead and give them a liturgy to argue with, and this is what you get. Not a solemn hour. A loud one, mostly, with a few silences in it that we left in on purpose. In this episode The crypt as instrument. What cold brick does to a line before it leaves your mouthWriting with ash, deep listening, poetry as spellcasting, and whether the word ritual is doing any real workMigration and diaspora, two versions of it, held up against each otherThe alter ego as a permission slip. The Piss I Call Art, and what a name lets you sayHoly Week borrowed as scaffolding by people the church would rather not have in the buildingThe prompt that neither of them wanted to answer, and what happened when they did anywayByuka Makodru (they/them) is a trans, disabled and migrant writer working across speculative fiction, experimental writing and poetry, with a practice that runs through immersive performance, ritual facilitation, visual art and publishing. Their crypt installation was written up by Asiimov Baker: a book with honeycomb pages held together by steel wire and black hair, sheets of parchment threaded through, and beside it something like sheet music distended out of all proportion, clefs and staves in black and red, fine as a hair in places and unbearably loud in others. Their work appears in Ache Magazine issue four, an extended issue of feminist writing on illness, health, bodies and pain. Ache No. 4: achemagazine.co.uk/issue-no-4Epitaph, on the crypt work: asiimovbaker.com/post/epitaph Pia Fajelagutan (she/her) is a poet, author and illustrator based between Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and London, whose work moves through migration, diaspora, philosophy and language. Her debut collection Whiskey For The Uninitiated became an Amazon bestseller and was carried into signings and appearances at the Emirates Literature Festival. She hosts workshops, performs internationally, and co-curates open mics and readings supporting emerging literary communities across the Middle East and the UK, with recent appearances at Hold Space Poetry Festival, Poetry Supper Club, Writers of Riyadh and the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. Hannah Kate + 2 Interviewed on Hannah's Bookshelf, North Manchester FM: hannahkate.netMake Poetry Weird Again. Poetry to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. @makepoetryweirdagain · makepoetryweirdagain.com

  5. Jul 22

    HOW TO MAKE POEMS HOLDING YOUR GRANDMOTHER'S HAND

    Nols gets an email from an unknown poet from Iceland called Nikulás so of course they record a podcast a few days later. Nik and Nols talk about his writing practice and hopes of sharing his work. Nik talks to leaving his home in Iceland because London and the world was more interesting. He write poems of longing and desperation. Recent work concerns his loss of his grandmother. These poems are sacred things and they came about because Nik sent an email. Nik and Nols make poems with prompts from the PENANCE workshop. After this episode was recorded Nols conducted the first 7 hour PENANCE LONG DAY where he made 23 further poems. Nik Shouts out Hollie McNish, Sexquisite, Mary Oliver to name a few. Follow Nik on instagram @shady_nik_ and reccomend him places to perform. Follow Nols @nolsnathankski Follow Make Poetry Weird Again @makepoetryweirdagain

  6. Jul 14

    HOW TO MAKE QUEER POETRY FOR 88 YEARS

    Nols meets a Willie Leo Coakley, legend of New York Queer Poetry at the Open Mic! Eighty-eight years is a long time to keep faith with a line of verse. William Leo Coakley has managed it. Poet writer and peace activist. Lover of men. Nols sits down with him to ask the one question worth asking a man who has done a thing that long: how. How do you keep the appetite? Coakley had an enemy a good one. Allen Ginsberg: the great howler, the Beat saint with his harmonium and his drug fuelled congregation, Coakley's poetry set its face against it. Coakley kept the old European hush, the rhyme, the measure. They shared a city and a century and could not abide one another. Coakley, quietly, is the one still here to tell the story. He is also the man who once put Thom Gunn into print on Helikon Press, the queer press he ran with his lover of 48 years. Thom Gunn, that other queer formalist who crossed from England to America and turned leather and grief and plague into stanzas built to hold. To have published Gunn and outlasted Ginsberg is a whole education in what poetry is actually for, and Coakley hands it over here. This is an hour with a living archive who flatly refuses to behave like one. The guest. William Leo Coakley New York poet, formalist, translator. His poems have appeared since 1958 in the Paris Review, the Nation, the London Magazine, Christopher Street and elsewhere across America, England, Ireland and Mexico, and he was chosen for the Discovery series at the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center. His poem "Horses Burning" took a prize in the Sotheby's International Poetry Competition, and his translation of Cavafy won the Der-Hovanessian Prize from the New England Poetry Club. He has recited Yeats at the Irish Repertory Theatre, Dickinson at the Botanical Garden, and his own poems at the Leslie-Lohman Museum. Publisher of Thom Gunn. Adversary, at a distance, of Allen Ginsberg.

  7. Jul 2

    HOW TO MAKE POEMS WITH KRAZY EYES & NO BELIEF

    Recorded in Holy Week, beneath the St Pancras New church, among the 557 dead that reside there. Nols makes poems with HOLD SPACE poetry festival residents Emma Keun and Maria Cohut. Some voices you have to go down to reach. This one we recorded in the dark of Holy Week, in the crypt where sixteen poets kept their residency like a wake that refused to be sad; candlewax and cold stone and the particular electricity of people making things they were not sure they were allowed to make. What you'll hear is two poets in the season of descent: burial, waiting, the rumour of a door. Here is the resurrection joke the calendar hides since we pressed record, both have come up out of the ground and headlined the HOLDSPACE open mic. Whatever was buried in April is walking around now, taking the mic, refusing to stay quiet. Poetry to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed, as ever. In this episode What it does to a poem to be written and read below ground — the crypt as instrument, not backdropMigration, identity, and writing in an adopted tongue (Maria's long theme, sharpened)The detective and the confessor: crime-fiction form as a way into unspeakable thingsHoly Week as a working structure for grief, not just beliefNols makes a freestyle based on emma's vape.Maria Cohut Brighton-based poet of Romanian origin, haunted (her word, and we let her keep it) by identity, migration, defamiliarisation, and the complexity of being a person among other people. Her debut collection Multiple Exposures (Flight of the Dragonfly Press, March 2026) reads migration as a mode of being and identity as a thing you develop, photographically, in layers. Her earlier chapbook Spatter Pattern (back room poetry, 2023) walks into the subject of gendered violence wearing the coat of detective fiction. Find Maria's work: Multiple Exposures (Flight of the Dragonfly Press, 2026) — via the other side of hope: https://othersideofhope.com/diary.htmlSpatter Pattern (back room poetry, 2023): https://backroompoetry.co.uk/Poems at The Hellebore: https://thehellebore.com/maria-cohut/Poems at The Hyacinth Review: https://hyacinthreview.org/author/maria-cohut/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mariac_phd/ Emma Keun Blakean Bard of the open mic is a london poet published in several major anthologies - influenced by fan fiction and queer tragedy. Emma makes every space she speaks at both sensual and spiritual while dealing with themes of embarrassment, the grotesque and the cruel haunting friction of love... A crypt resident, HOLDSPACE headliner and friend of the show! Her debut pamphlet will be released by MAKE POETRY WEIRD AGAIN - watch this space! Find Emma's work: @elkwrites000555

  8. Jun 24

    HOW TO FIND DIVINITY IN LUST AT THE OPEN MIC

    In February 2026 Nols Nathankski had the honour of sitting down with Robert Stanley Adams: a 73-year-old Canadian poet who writes from the seam where the divine and the erotic are not two things but one breath. This podcast only happened because Robert walked out of the open mic with Nol's coat! Some books arrive late because they had to be lived first. After a chance meeting at the Word Zoo open mic one of those London nights where the holy walks in off the street a myth was made. Robert has just published The Book of Love, a summation of twenty years of writing and of spiritual-sexual practice a lifetime's apprenticeship in holy love, finally bound. He's joined by his daughter Tamar, his baby granddaughter (the youngest guest this podcast has ever hosted), and his editor Lia, the midwife of the manuscript. Together they ask the question the work itself keeps asking: why has it taken so long for a voice like Robert's to reach the world and what does it mean to give your whole life to love, and only now hand it over? Robert on the marriage of the divine and the erotic body as scripture, desire as a way of prayer. Twenty years of practice distilled into one volume. Lia on editing a life rather than a manuscript. Tamar on growing up inside this work, and carrying it forward with a daughter of her own now in the room. And the long question of belated recognition: what the world misses when it isn't listening, and what it gains when it finally is. LINKS @robert.stanley.adams@flamencolia.official@the_word_zoo MAKE POETRY WEIRD AGAIN poetry to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed makepoetryweirdagain.com ·Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/mpwa If this episode gave you something, consider supporting MPWA so we can keep making it. Subscribe, share, and come find us at an event.

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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

Information

  • Creator
    Nols Nathankski
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    86
  • Rating
    Explicit