‘It still amazes me’: VERVE Poetry

You’ve arrived in the heart of it. Birmingham New Street Station used to be a place of dread for me; I associated it with missing the last connection to Scotland on winter nights, and being absorbed into the weird subculture of the waiting room where station staff hollered the names of cities, and we left-over passengers would be swished, alone or with fellow strangers, into inter-city cabs going direct – Birmingham to Carlisle, Birmingham to Glasgow, at the cost of the train companies which failed to run on time. Staircases, suitcases, the howling emptiness of platforms. Long night’s journey into night. How that has changed. VERVE festival, which I have attended on and off for years, is a heartbeat away from the station, impossible even for a dyspraxic visitor like me to miss. My ears pick up at the announcement ‘Birmingham’; my body becomes eager to disembark; I expect poetry. To be in the heart of it.

VERVE Poetry and Spoken Word Festival, founded in 2017, is more than an annual event. With a tagline of ‘honouring poetry’ all year, it hosts an online workshop series, a bookshop, a monthly poetry competition, and gigs. When I heard that it had temporarily lost funding (a predicament thankfully solved), I was stunned. Cultural commentators talk out of the sides of their mouth and with big eyes about ‘division’, ‘polarization’ and other -izations. Unless bad news is something we want – like the thin cat who refused home food, having learnt to relish scavenging bins – why would anyone do anything other than invest in, strengthen, ...