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
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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
poetry · spoken word · queer · london · poetry festival · crypt ·
bloomsbury festival · neil bartlett · open mic · zine · workshops ·
make poetry weird again
HOW TO MAKE POEMS ON A PODCAST NAKED
dimanche 30 août 2026 • Durée 01:18:11
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
Make Poetry Weird Again — poetry to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. Subscribe, share, and come find us at an event.
HOW TO TAKE POETRY FROM THE LIBRARY TO THE CASTLE
Saison 1 · Épisode 102
lundi 17 août 2026 • Durée 44:08
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.
HOW TO MAKE CRYPTOLOGICAL POEMS FOR THE UNINITIATED
Saison 1 · Épisode 81
vendredi 31 juillet 2026 • Durée 59:15
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 mouth
Writing with ash, deep listening, poetry as spellcasting, and whether the word ritual is doing any real work
Migration and diaspora, two versions of it, held up against each other
The alter ego as a permission slip. The Piss I Call Art, and what a name lets you say
Holy Week borrowed as scaffolding by people the church would rather not have in the building
The prompt that neither of them wanted to answer, and what happened when they did anyway
Byuka 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-4
Epitaph, 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.net
Make Poetry Weird Again. Poetry to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
@makepoetryweirdagain · makepoetryweirdagain.com
HOW TO MAKE QUEER POETRY FOR 88 YEARS
Saison 1 · Épisode 98
mardi 14 juillet 2026 • Durée 01:10:19
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.
HOW TO MAKE POEMS WITH KRAZY EYES & NO BELIEF
Saison 1 · Épisode 80
jeudi 2 juillet 2026 • Durée 38:47
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 backdrop
Migration, 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 things
Holy Week as a working structure for grief, not just belief
Nols 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.
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
HOW TO FIND DIVINITY IN LUST AT THE OPEN MIC
Saison 1 · Épisode 67
mercredi 24 juin 2026 • Durée 42:16
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
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Subscribe, share, and come find us at an event.
HOW TO SAVE AN OLD CHURCH WITH AN OCTAVE
Saison 1 · Épisode 95
lundi 15 juin 2026 • Durée 01:34:31
This week Nols is joined by Mikey Kirkpatrick flautist, singer, composer, improviser and performer and writer, who makes work for street, stage, film and radio. Mikey records and tours internationally as Bird Radio, his singular take on new British folk (voice, flutes, loops, bones, homemade instruments and the famous red suitcase kick drum). He’s an associate lecturer at Goldsmiths and founding director of Alchemy, a collective of artists, teachers and mentors working with young people at risk of exclusion, and he teaches Music, Healing and Deep Listening for Morbid Anatomy in New York.
Nols and Mikey met at the Octave Marathon at the Old Church in Stoke Newington. The event was a way to raise money to save one of the most unique arts space and consecrated church in london.
Donate below or buy the album! (Nols is on it ;) )
Nols and Mikey go looking for the music in everything including poetry. Mikey opens up his many daily creative practices and the threads that hold them together, and traces the extraordinary journeys behind the music and the writing. They talk about what it means to be a pillar of a creative community, and the genuinely impressive work Mikey does with young people in London building shelter for them to make, listen, and find their own voices.
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.
HOW TO MAKE POEMS WHEN NO ONE KNOWS WHERE YOU COME FROM
Saison 1 · Épisode 94
mercredi 3 juin 2026 • Durée 35:19
Nols and Ameer make poems on the first day of Hold Space Poetry festival on April fools day 2026
Ameer Azad is a Pakistani-Bengali poet and author living in London. His work often covers surrealism, social satire and spirituality. Usually seen yelling at open mics in a scary voice.
In this episode, Nols and Ameer write to a set of prompts and talk through making poems when no one knows where you come from.
Prompts(provided by Chloe Smith of Skibbable open mic)
Shout-outs
The Never Press
Wordspace
Resonance Poetry
Chloe Smith / Skibbable open mic
Make Poetry Weird Again is a Queer experimental poetry organisation based in north London. Poetry to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
The Crypt Gallery and Make Poetry Weird Again Present HOLD SPACE POETRY FESTIVAL: From The Depths 1-5th October 2026.
Nols Nathankski and H Phillips sit down to make poems in the crypt during HOLD SPACE poetry festival.
H is a London based queer and silly poet. H began her open mic journey by doing a poetry for performance course @citylit. H talks from grief through objects and absurdity. A resident at Hold Space festival. H displayed poetry on the walls of the crypt and can be found headlining at the Hold Space Open Mic on the 31st May 2026 at HWK in Hackney Wick.
Follow her @haitch_speaks
Nols and H make poems with prompts from the Hold Space prompt sheet.
H shouts out @everythingpoetry @wordspacepoems
Make Poetry Weird Again is a Queer experimental poetry organisation based in north London. Poetry to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
The Crypt Gallery and Make Poetry Weird Again Present HOLD SPACE POETRY FESTIVAL: From The Depths 1-5th October 2026.
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