Welcome to the bank holiday edition of the PIG Update - best served with a cool drink and a volume of poetry while kicking back in the Glasgow sun.
Enjoy!

Events (25 May to 7 June 2026)

The fortnight kicks off on Monday (25 May) with the online Discover Poetry reading group, organised by Wordsworth Grasmere and hosted by poet Polly Atkin. Sit down with a cup of tea and share your thoughts on a selection of classic and contemporary poems inspired by the changing seasons and current events. It's a warm and welcoming space for enthusiasts and beginners alike, running on Zoom from 7:30pm.

Tuesday (26 May) is a busy one. Over in the East End, the fourth Open Mic Night at Riddrie Library is coming to Cumbernauld Road from 6pm. Organised by local collective East End My Friend, the evening features comedic poet David Hennessy, musicians Mateja Briody and Nighthorse, and comedian Scott McCormack, with more performers still to be announced. The event is free but ticketed. If you'd like to perform, get in touch with the organisers via email. Meanwhile, in the West End, the Midnight Verse is back at The Drake for its monthly spoken word, poetry, music and storytelling open stage, hosted by Marc Molloy. This month's featured artist is Niamh Corkey, described as one of the brightest and most exciting acts on the Scottish music scene right now. The night starts at 8pm and as always, it will be recorded live for release as a podcast. If you'd like a reading slot, sign up via Instagram DMs. Also on Tuesday evening, the Scottish Writers' Centre Speakeasy is taking over the Function Suite at The Griffin on Bath Street from 7pm. The SWC Speakeasy nights are a welcoming platform for poetry, fiction, prose, storytelling and more, with 5-minute slots available to performers. The night will also celebrate the commended entries and winners from the SWC Hope Fundraising Competition. Book your free ticket asap.

Wednesday (27 May) has a double bill in the West End. Ross Wilcock's monthly Poetry Experiment open mic is back at The Alchemy Experiment on Byres Road. Doors open at 7pm, with the show starting at 7:30pm. Tickets are £5 and performers get a free drink. Just sign up at the door. Up the road at Hillhead Bookclub, the weekly Poet's Corner is on from 7:30pm. As usual, slots are 5-10 minutes and you just show up to sign up. Make sure to check the organiser's Instagram ahead of time for the weekly theme.

Not A Salon, the monthly open stage at Rufus T Firefly returns on Thursday (28 May) from 8pm. It's open to writers of all genres, styles and experience levels. So prepare yourself for a brilliantly eclectic and unpredictable mix of poetry, prose and/or theatrical monologues. Slots are 5 minutes and you can sign up on the night or drop the organisers a line on Instagram.

The Poetry Society presents a free online workshop aimed specifically at younger writers on Friday (29 May). Getting Curious, is run in partnership with Europeana via the Young Poets Network and offers a one-hour writing workshop for 14-25 year olds, led by Dr Beth Daley. No previous experience is needed. Participants are encouraged to keep editing their work and submit it to the Getting Curious Challenge, which is open until 14 June.

Sunday (31 May) has two very different events to choose from. In the afternoon, Off-Page is hosting its Annual Live Performance Showcase at Many Studios on Ross Street as part of this year's Off-Page visual poetry exhibition (which, btw, I can highly recommend). Artists from this year's cohort will be reading and presenting their work, alongside two very special guests: Imogen Stirling and Two Mics Please! (Amy Brennan-Clark and Taya Sian). The event is free but tickets are limited, so book ahead! It runs from 1pm to 3pm. In the evening, the Scottish BPOC Writers Network is hosting an online book launch event celebrating three recently published authors: novelist Michael Fellowes, poet Mohammed Salihu with his collection Voices from the Soil: Wounds and Wisdom, and Yasmin Hanif with her picture book Abdullah's Bear Needs a Name!. The event is hosted by Katie Goh and runs from 6pm. Tickets are £10/£6 for SBWN members and £12 for Allies and Friends.

There's a packed line-up on Monday (1 June). Candlelight Poetry is back at The Old Toll Bar on the Southside from 7:30pm. To read at this monthly open mic, message Ross McFarlane via Instagram ahead of time. Also on Monday evening, Poetry @ Inn Deep is on from 7:30pm on Great Western Road. Again, slots are doled out via Instagram DMs, so reach out to Sam if you want to read. If you are more in the mood to stay on the sofa, Cheltenham Poetry Festival has got you covered. Its June Online Poetry Lounge features readings by Yousif M. Qasmiyeh and Christopher Crawford alongside an open mic section. Tickets are £3 and the virtual doors open at 7pm. Also beginning on Monday evening is the first in the 2026 Maudsley Lectures Series in Psychoanalysis: Writing and the Unconscious, organised by the Institute of Psychoanalysis. The series explores connections between literature and psychoanalysis, featuring poets, writers and clinicians including Adam Phillips, Kit Fan, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Glyn Maxwell and Rey Conquer. The first seminar, What Happened to You? Further Adventures in Poetry and Psychology, is led by Glyn Maxwell and takes place online from 7:30pm. The series continues through June and July. Tickets are £31 per session.

On Tuesday (2 June), the monthly Open Book Creative Writing Session is on at Glasgow Women's Library from 10:30am. Led by poet Kathrine Sowerby, these thoughtful sessions use poetry and short stories as prompts for your own creative writing - and they're completely free. The event is targeted at women (16+). In the evening, if you're looking for a cosier online option, Laurie Bolger is hosting the latest edition of Poetry in Pyjamas via Zoom from 8pm. Pyjamas, nightcaps and blankets are warmly encouraged. Special guests this month are Gail Webb, Jake Wild Hall and Amy Acre. Tickets are £15.87.

Wednesday (3 June) has more West End open mic goodness with Poet's Corner back at Hillhead Bookclub from 7:30pm. The monthly Poetry at Sweeney's open mic night has moved and is now on every first Wednesday of the month. Expect the same welcoming atmosphere and supportive community as always - just on a different day of the month. Also on Wednesday evening, Poetry Ireland is hosting an online writing workshop, Finding Lightning in the Unlikely, led by Sean Borodale - currently Poetry Ireland Poet in Residence - from 6:30pm. The workshop explores those first sparks of inspiration and what to do with them. Tickets are £22 for the two-hour workshop.

One of the highlights of the fortnight is happening on Thursday (4 June). Good Press is hosting the Glasgow launch of Aquafaba by Colin Herd, with additional readings from Meredith MacLeod Davidson and Anjeli Caderamanpulle. Aquafaba - named after the sappy liquid beans float in - is Colin's playful, heartfelt new collection in which "poetry is figured as the slushy, hokey, surfeit fluid we knock about in as we leach our own emotional starch." Are you as intrigued as me? Get yourself to Good Press for 6:30pm.

Bulb! another one of Colin's projects (he's got plenty) is back on Friday (5 June) at Lilybank Gardens from 2:30pm. You can look forward to another joyful, al fresco afternoon of readings. Featured readers remain a closely guarded secret until the day. Most recently they included Zain Rishi, Tim Tim Cheng and Dan Dean, so I am curious to see what Colin and Claire pull out of their garden hat this time! Free and open to all.

The fortnight wraps up with a lovely community celebration on Sunday (7 June). City of Poets is celebrating its 4th Birthday at Finn's Place on Ledard Road on the Southside from 3:30pm. Whether you've been part of the community for years or are brand new, you're very welcome to come along and enjoy an afternoon of poetry, snacks, creativity and good company. Free to attend.

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Opportunities

Today's pick from among the long list of opportunities currently on the PIG website:

Sextet, the online literary magazine run by Glasgow's Six Foot Gallery is currently seeking submissions for its fourth issue. The theme for this call is Melting Point and goes alongside the gallery's summer open call. Selected work may also be featured in audio format in the exhibition. The focus of the issue is on the way the summer heat transforms Glasgow in different ways: bodily, emotional, material or environmental. You are invited to explore "writing as an alchemical process; the heat of summer as an artistic catalyst". The deadline is 29 May.

A unique opportunity for a writing retreat is offered by Hay Festival in partnership with Airbnb. The Room to Write Award offers UK-based published writers time, space, and a change of environment to help fuel creativity. Eight writers will be awarded an Airbnb coupon worth £1,500, enabling them to stay in a UK location of their choosing that best supports focused, uninterrupted writing. Sounds fun? Throw your hat in the ring until 31 May.

StoryTree is still taking sign-ups for its second Poetry Slam, taking place on Wednesday 17 June at The Bungalow in Paisley. Ten poets will perform poems of up to 3 minutes across two rounds, with the top three going head-to-head in a final round. The winner receives the night's full donations pot, a poem featured in the next StoryTree magazine issue, and a framed artwork by StoryTree artist Elaine O'Neill. Sign-ups close at midnight on 31 May.

But that's not the only StoryTree-related opportunity: the call for submissions for issue 4 of the StoryTree magazine is currently open, too. Get your writing in until 3 June.

Also closing on 31 May is the submission window for issue 8 of Wet Grain Poetry. This brilliant magazine is dedicated to poetry and essays on matters of land-use, provenance and ownership. You can submit up to five pages of poetry and published poets are paid £50 per poem.

As mentioned in the last PIG Update, the National Poetry Centre is currently seeking poems for its Hope Collective 3.0 anthology. The publication explores loss and grief and includes four categories: silence, trace, shadow and longing. Submissions are still open until 4 June.

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PIG Spotlight

This section is designed to shine a spotlight on a particular website, organisation or feature. For each Update, I'll pick something new - either because it is plain awesome or because it's new or really topical.

Today's spotlight is on the Ledbury Poetry Festival. The 10-day festival in this little market town in Herefordshire - halfway between Birmingham and Cardiff - has been running annually since 1997. This year, the festival is on from 26 June to 5 July and the programme includes some true gems such as a reading night featuring Joelle Taylor, Salena Godden and Nikita Gill, and a queer showcase with Leo Boix, Keith Jarrett and Peter Scalpello. An evening with Anthony Joseph and Tishani Doshi sets out to explore "grief and joy, memory and resistance [...] across landscapes both intimate and global." I am currently obsessed with Anthony Joseph's new album - so this is a definite highlight for me. Sarah Howe will be reading during a session with Dzifa Benson that promises to reflect on "inheritance, identity and the architecture of memory." There will also be a session with Simon Armitage and one celebrating Seamus Heaney as well as a fun edition of Desert Island Poems with Stuart Maconie.

The full programme of the festival is available to view via the Ledbury Poetry website and tickets are already on sale. Many of the events are also offered as a livestream. For £30 you can get the Ledbury Poetry Digital Pass which gives you access to a total of 22 events online - including recordings of any event you weren't able to catch live. Sounds like a fantastic deal to me.

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PIG's Poetry Pick

I warned you: I am all about Anthony Joseph at the moment. So for today's poetic pick it had to be something from his new album The Ark.
The track/poem below is one of my favourite on the album. It references the Caribbean writer, poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant and his seminal book [Poetics of Relation](https://press.umich.edu/Books/P/Poetics-of-Relation)*. You can also listen to Anthony talk about this particular track on his Instagram here.

Transposition in Space (Glissant)

by Anthony Joseph
Listen to the track via Bandcamp

Transposition of Space
in which the same rain that irrigates a field may circulate — return again

return again
to irrigate the valley return again as rain
as light as light
in a dream
in which
we are walking
streets which lean
at degrees
searching for the home we left behind

Within the transposition of space the sky the same
the sun, the same, the stars remain.

But pity the immigrant
who loses more than collective faith transformed by distance —
we scandalise our names.

Streets we walked and left behind, seem to reappear here
in this new, distant space.
In cities in which we lose ourselves
In cities in which we may find

the spiritual, which are
sacred spaces in and of themselves

— spatial axises of memory and forgetting

I read a poem in which the poet was flying a kite
in Kensington Gardens in the same wind that blew from the wet lands

of Guyana
in the same sun that shone from Bridgetown, Barbados the tail still tangled

in the beams
of a house
on an old estate.
And I have become
more Caribbean
here than when I fell asleep in the arms
of an orange tree.

Transposition of space,
in which one place,
becomes another
Is that London, or is that the Western Main Road in St James, in Port of Spain.

Or the road near the biscuit factory and its cinnamon air
transposed
to a street elsewhere,

or how an island
looks familiar from across the river surely this retention
is the topography
of loss and geography
Translocation of space-time
as a meditation on loss

— beloved space —

I know roads I drove along saying this happened here
that happened there
I know heat stays in the body
I know the dutch door and the blue paint which was broken

But this place existed
as a mirage and dance of glimpses of postcolonial imaginings —

London was not real
It was impressionist

— rain and grey — the grey stone of a doric pillar
high contrast black and white set against the static
of the sky

Arthurian fog
rising to my knees
— what light could exist in the promise of rain?

A road...
but the depth of field is shallow unfurl of white and spume curling into the mind
and from the left of this frame
— a cart, a wooden bed
— old hell — to carry sugar cane or cocoa
where the tray
is laden down
with cargo
at 30 degrees
until it disappears into the white foam of history

And then the old calypsonian
is singing a song
born long before Windrush
Born before Aunt Agnes even reach here in London in the very early seventies
and before Uncle Harry come to study civil planning, Caribbean folk was here strolling down Piccadilly
singing some old suit and tie song about the wonders of empire
—- tropic nostalgia when the empire was part of the Caribbean or at least part of our consciousness.

And I came to you that night
connecting in a gap of time
so long memoried now
that we could hardly remember how we met
or what was said.
We went walking that night hallucinating on LSD
in the backroads of Finsbury Park lilting in the moonlight
arm in arm
as the sky seemed to expand and rise further then nearer with each breath how even in the darkness
we felt safe and warm

It was summer
the summer I spent
writing poems overlooking Hornsey Road transposing time
into space

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That's it from me today. See you in two weeks!

Love,
Annie

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