www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2025 All videos and photos at this lunk.
One of the best EPF’s there has been. 11 events, near enough 1000 people attending and 100s of poets too. I’m happy with it, it was fun. It’s hard to describe the experience, prepping it for six months, welcoming so many people travelling in, old friends, new poets, going from night to night in this few weeks, venue to venue, performance to performance. Watching over 100 performances in a few weeks. It’s intense, and enthusiastic. The stress is minimal, physical. This year, as ever, but more than any year before, I felt the culture and mission of the festival was understood by almost everyone involved. That it is a space for play, risk, experiment. People are free. And that it is supposed to be as communal, friendly, funny, welcoming as possible in experience, so the work can be as weird and strange as possible. That it doesn’t matter if the performances or poems are perfect, but that there is a culmination through each event of people building friendships through collaboration and innovation. This was consistent throughout each night in 2025.
I could write an essay about each night, the 125 people at the first Cypriot event, the weirdly perfect synchronicity of the Flanders event, the communality of the Estonian event, the ritualism of the Lithuanian event, the wildness of the Norwegian event, the wit of the Austrian event, the wryness of the Latvian event, they were all really good. Wonderful to get to Norwich, Kingston, Liverpool, to engage the communities I’ve got to know around those places. It’s best to just let the videos and photos speak for the thing. There is extensive documentation of everything at the links below, please do click on them and have a watch of some of the performances.
For my performances I collaborated with Krisjanis Zelgis (a pro wrestling match), Vanessa Onwuemezi (a sound poetry improvised duet), Katarina Krupickova, twice (two dance poetry pieces, the first a contemporary dance with abstracted actions, the second a spinning talking performance), Maria Barnas (an anti-comedy talking performance) and Tom Jenks (a new batch of our Proverb poems). Some were perfect, some faltered, all good in the spirit of the thing. I look forward to next year and want to say thank you to the people who dug in to support me in 2025 - Eleanor Wilders, Danica Ignacio, Matt Sokulsky, Cameron Wade, Katerina Koulouri, Caitlin Nugent, David Spittle, Julia Rose Lewis, and who were there, helping almost every night and with the documentation. 100s more too, so many friends amplified, and it worked.