At the start of last week, I took the tram into Birmingham (a sleepy village on the southern fringes of the Black Country, for those of you in any doubt) and made my way to Brum Radio, the sleepy village’s independent radio station. Each month, Brum Radio puts on a one-hour show called Brum Radio Poetry, hosted by West Midlands poet Rick Sanders.
Here, a short interlude to sing Rick’s praises. He’s been hosting this show for several years now, offering a platform for the region’s poets – two or three in each show – to share their work with the station’s listeners. He also runs an excellent monthly poetry night – Caffe Grande Slam – in Dudley, and on top of that he’s an accomplished writer and performer of comic poetry and an all-round good egg. If you’re a poet in the West Midlands, you’ll know Rick. There’s also every chance you’ll have been on his show, because he works harder than anyone I know to lift other people’s voices. And probably doesn’t get a fraction of the credit he deserves. Maybe this paragraph will go some way to addressing that.
Anyway, I was appearing on the March episode of Brum Radio Poets alongside Matt Black, whose new collection Fishing Dentures Out Of Mashed Potato is one I heartily recommend. If you so wish, you can listen to Matt, Rick, and myself chatting, laughing, and setting the world to rights by clicking this link here. I hope the fun we had comes through in the recording.
Oh, and if you’re visiting Birmingham and/or the wider West Midlands at any point, you’ll find that both Matt and I now each have one of our poems geo-tagged to specific locations, courtesy of the Overhear app. Download the app, make your way to where the poems are geo-tagged, and you can listen to them. My poem is 7.19 in the evening, and which came joint second a couple of years ago in the Poets & Players poetry competition, and it’s now geo-tagged to the tram stop in Stephenson Street, just outside New Street station. You don’t have to go to Birmingham to listen to it, though – it’s included in Rick’s show, so you can enjoy it from the comfort of your own home. Or someone else’s, if you prefer. Just make sure you ask them first.
There you go. A blog which is actually about poetry, rather than one railing at the state of the world. I surprise myself sometimes, I really do.
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