Writing the North: How Failure Can Help You Fly – Column

Poetry event at Monocle, Hull. Image Credit: Cath Muldowney.

Each month Keith Fenton, a Leeds-based performance poet, broadcaster and host of Poets Talking Bollocks podcast, explores the events, people and debates shaping literary culture in the North. This month, he reflects on poetry as experiment, and why failure, risk and innovation are the lifeblood of a thriving scene.

Choosing a favourite out of the 32 podcasts Poets Talking Bollocks recorded from August 2023 to March 2025 (a return is imminent) would be like trying to choose a favourite offspring, but I have very fond memories of the one we did with the poetic genius that is Fran Lock at her home in Folkestone in June 2024. Asked “What is the failure of poetry?”, her reply squared us up: “Poetry is failure.”

She certainly didn’t mean that poetry was rubbish. What she meant was that poetry will always fall short, that the exploration of the world through a poetic lens is never done, and that we must never be afraid to experiment, to innovate, to fail. It takes great courage to do this, courage I often – yes – fail to find within me.

Fran sits on the editorial advisory board of the open-access (hooray!) Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, alongside Scott Thurston. It was Scott who told me (because she is far too modest) about Fran’s extraordinary article for the Journal called Thinking the Working-Class Aven’t Gard, which has guided much of my theoretical approach since, even if not yet my regular practice.

Of course, this is not to say I am unexperimental in all things. The Poets Talking Bollocks podcast itself was an experiment, one which surprised us with how it took off, but it was also hardly flawless and won’t be in future. That is all part of its experimental nature, and we have ridden the failures as gladly as the successes. And when, just before Christmas in 2023, we combined a podcast with Jack Horner, known by his stage name Leon the Pig Farmer, with a Sunday afternoon event at the Chemic to launch his third book, it dawned on us that Sunday afternoon poetry might be a gap in the market. It propelled us towards the Poets Talking Bollocks Presents monthly poetry event, a truly experimental spin-off from the podcast but also one that came to enjoy a symbiotic relationship with its eponymous project. We started in February 2024 and have thus just celebrated our second birthday.

Meanwhile, my friend Tom Branfoot’s More Song celebrates its 3rd birthday in March. This event likes to showcase experimental and innovative poetry, immediately setting it apart from other serious poetry events, which can be comparatively dry. It inspires me to (not just insist upon, but) encourage innovation and experiment at my events, which are usually more mixed-standard, but I feel that this should be encouraged at every level, as this is how craft develops. At the last More Song, Leeds treasure Kimberly Campanello gave a virtuoso performance of some of her reworking of Dante’s Comeddia, of which we will hear much more this year at Chapel FM’s Writing on Air festival, and at the Leeds LitFest, not to mention its publication later in the year. Despite its roots in old texts, the new treatment is as innovative as it gets.

Kimberly Campanello at More Song. Image Credit: Tom Branfoot.

Both the Chapel FM Arts Centre and its festival give opportunities widely and democratically to run, host, devise, direct and produce events that will be broadcast and then archived in perpetuity. It’s an enormous opportunity for novice writers and seasoned pros alike to have a voice, to try things out, and not to worry unduly about failure. Indeed, I owe my own development to Chapel FM, as I started broadcasting there just before the Covid lockdowns 6 years ago and, finding that my poetry was not as good as I’d hoped it might be, I was given all the space I needed to learn and develop away from the show but still broadcast, still continue to test how far my development had come. It also taught me the value of writing at all levels, and is the place that introduced me, a few years ago, to a hugely exciting young poet Tallulah Howarth, who has headlined More Song in recent months, and last Saturday put on a petit tour de force at the Writing on Air Festival with Carrieanne Vivianette. Tallulah has developed an interest in restrictive form and in particular “grid poetry”, not something for which I have many points of reference but it seems – in her hands at least – as innovative as it gets.

Combined with Carrieanne’s passion for “sound poetry”, something else about which I have little knowledge, their show GRIDLOCK was a thrilling tumble into a world where strict form somehow feels anarchic. In the final piece, ‘Grid Ghazal’, the narrators start by getting up in a morning which is moved by morning, a pen that is running out of morning, folded clothes creased with morning, windows fogged up by morning, then taking us through breakfasts they never usually eat, and mothers, and housemates, until it is ramped up into a mantra of things “I never usually eat….[e.g.] the house/my folded clothes/the windows” building to a crescendo which abruptly and comically ends with “I never usually eat…..my mother”.

Poetry event at Monocle, Hull. Image Credit: Cath Muldowney.

The event was followed by the more experienced but no less innovative Anne Caldwell, whose sequences in her new collection ‘The Language of Now’, which weave the delicate ecosystems of peat-bogs with the vulnerability of the human body and grief, were accompanied by films she had made with her late partner and other family members in peat-bogs in Finland and Yorkshire. As Anne was keen to highlight in the interview with Tony Macaluso, which also formed part of the event, this body of work forms an important archive, as do the peat-bogs, which retain even more carbon than rainforests, and for which a 1-metre layer represents 10000 years.

It takes a lot less than that to establish regular poetry events, I’m glad to say. All the regular projects I have mentioned here feel like they have been with us some time, but in reality, a few short years ago, none of them existed. I recommend everyone consider starting something, and not be afraid to innovate, experiment, even fail. I was asked by my poet friend Liam Sullivan to help last week with an event at Monocle, a fairly new art gallery in Hull, as his friend exhibits art there and wanted to do a poetry event. I got a crew of poets together from the area, Liam’s friend turned out to be the partner of one of the families that own the building and created the gallery, and we had a great night performing poetry and making new connections. But it also turned out that it had been an experiment, with a view to more events down the line. I expect great things will ensue, but even if they don’t, it was always worth the risk, and brings me back to a mantra I have developed from earlier columns: keep sowing those seeds!

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