The Feral Angels’ Poetry Café

The online drop-in poetry café and community for exploring poetics and writing more of the kind of poetry you’d really love to write.

Booking a pay-what-you-like place will give you access to the video-call details for the call and to the recording for one year.

The Feral Angels’ Poetry Café is an ongoing project by poet and teacher Tom Hirons to encourage poetry-writing that has vibrant life-force, and to liberate poetry from the confines of dusty libraries or the world of polo-necked intellectuals (no disrespect to libraries, intellectuals or polo-necks intended.) Less poetry-as-clever-language and more poetry-as-folk-medicine, poetry-as-medicine-against-the-Devourer, poetry that wakes the spirits up. Everyone is welcome, whether they’re seasoned writers or poetry-curious beginners. There’s no pressure to share writing, at any point, only invitation.

Our working starting point of poetry is: truth told in ways that carry power. And that power can be written into the poem in a variety of ways. How we do that is what we’re interested in exploring.

The Feral Angels’ Poetry Café has been running online for the past four years, sometimes attracting hundreds of participants. This season will likely see smaller, more intimate affairs. Our drop-in, pay-what-you-choose poetry community events are a rare opportunity to make contact with a vibrant culture of poetry and to breathe life into your writing. Questions? Contact Tom or Em via tom@tomhirons.com

All sessions are on ColloCall, an instance of BigBlueButton (an Open Source video conferencing platform) hosted by a German tech co-op, and are recorded - registering means you get access to the recording for a year.

(Why ‘Feral Angels’? Because the poetry we love tends to have something of both the gutter and the stars. And our poets tend to have something of the bright heavens about them, but also something of the tangled wilds. The term came during a conversation with friends years ago, and only much later did we realise the connection to Temporary Autonomous Zones, and to Jay Griffith’s Wild.)