I’m very lucky that the courses I set up in the pandemic, mostly online and around both specific fields of poetry methods, and also recently more open project-supporting workshops, have attracted some extraordinary people who are equally extraordinary poets. This has coalesced into really positive and inspiring things, a collective, events, and many plans for the future. What it has also done, I’m proud to say, is to bring the work of some of those poets into publication form. Not necessarily directly, but in terms of their projects coming to fruition through these various connections and explorations and ideas that I have proudly had a hand in encouraging and facilitating.

I feel a responsibility to the quality of their work, these poets who I get to work with regularly, because it speaks to their originality, and to what should be getting attention in the UK, at the moment. Six books are being launched in and around my festival this summer, six books that represent a range of authentic, idiosyncratic and quite daring explorations of what poetry is. From performance scores to photopoetry, from language poetry to selecteds, from radical translations to conceptualism – these books speak to something that I am so happy to have had a hand in, the POPOGROU collective and it’s many brilliant poets. (Links and and more to follow)