Verbose at The King’s Arms

Now creeping up on a decade (there’s a big tenth birthday bash organised for January), award-winning Verbose is one of Manchester’s longest-running monthly spoken word and live literature events, featuring an open mic plus two guest performers – this month Helen Ivory and Martin Figura.

This month, Verbose also boasts a new line-up of hosts, with Becky May and Alice Godliman joining Ilaria Robinson-Passeri and Alicia Fitton, who (alongside Lisa O’Hare) have been carefully curating and shepherding headliners plus various open mic performers on the fourth Monday of each month for getting on for two years. Becky May is a Manchester-based poet and recent graduate of The Manchester Writing School at Man Met University. Her work has appeared in PN Review, 14 Magazine and Ink, Sweat & Tears. Alice Godliman is a Pushcart-nominated writer and workshop facilitator, whose debut chapbook The Book of (seeing past the) Shadows came out in 2022.

Verbose is a night with a real community vibe that welcomes all types of new writing, and offers a vibrant mix of spoken word and live literature – expect poetry, prose and everything in between. The talented bill of open mic acts includes newcomers as well as writers with decades of experience; if you’d like to bagsy a four-minute reading slot, get in touch with Verbose direct to put your name on the list (or waiting list).

So, a little more on November’s headliners…

Helen Ivory and Martin Figura are married and, during lockdown, opened up their home, a former butcher’s shop, to the land of Zoom, regularly running Live From The Butchery online reading sessions. Both have new collections out and have been zipping up and down the country giving readings, so we’re please to see them making it to sunny Salford.

Constructing a Witch is poet and visual artist Helen Ivory’s sixth collection of “bewitching poems” – it just came out in October with Bloodaxe Books and is a Poetry Book Society Winter Recommendation. In fact, the PBS e-newsletter just revealed the magic that Constructing a Witch includes 10 of Helen’s collage poems, and she explains the process thus: “With the collage/poems – this way of working always feels alchemic to me; the magical process of transformation and creation… Words also carry things over from all their past lives – a kind of magical process or quantum entanglement, if you will.”

Helen Ivory was awarded a Cholmondeley Award by the Society of Authors in 2024, and last year her Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems appeared from MadHat in the US. Her surrealist chapbook Maps of the Abandoned City was published by SurVision in 2019 and the poem ‘The Square of the Clockmaker’ is riding the rails as one of the Poems on the Underground. She has work translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Croatian, Spanish and Greek as part of the Versopolis European poetry platform, and she edits the webzine Ink, Sweat & Tears and teaches for the National Centre for Writing Academy.

Martin Figura’s latest collection, The Remaining Men, has just been published by Cinnamon Press, and his collection and show Whistle were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and won the 2013 Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show. Shed (Gatehouse Press) and Dr Zeeman’s Catastrophe Machine (Cinnamon Press) were both published in 2016. In 2021 he was Salisbury NHS Writer in Residence; the resulting pamphlet My Name is Mercy (Fair Acre Press) won a national NHS award. A second pamphlet from Fair Acre Press, Sixteen Sonnets for Care, came out in October 2022.

Poet Clare Shaw says of The Remaining Men, described as “a Condition of England book”: “Precise and powerful, these are portraits of ordinary and extraordinary lives, interwoven with the poet’s own remarkable story. They form a collection of great intellectual rigour, skill and emotional force – but written with such tenderness, such a light touch, that you are willing to follow him into the most challenging territory. A good thing, because this book will deepen your understanding of the messy business of being alive.”