Rainham Poetry Festival 2025
Come join us for a two-day festival of poetry, with special guest, Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage.​​
St Margaret's Church
High St
Rainham
Kent
ME8 8AN​​
The Festival is free for both days. Please reserve your ticket(s) by clicking on the BOOK TICKETS above which will secure your Eventbrite place.
Fri 11 April - Sat 12 April 2025
About the Festival
The Rainham Poetry Festival brings together local, national and international voices, each bearing their own distinctive message.
New writers mix with celebrated poets, to present their work, at St Margaret's Rainham on Watling Street - the old Roman road connecting London and the whole of Britain with the Channel Ports and Europe beyond.
And here in this church we will reflect on the power of poetry to transform our world. ​
Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage
We are delighted that the Poet Laureate will headline the Rainham Poetry Festival. Simon Armitage is an English poet, playwright, musician and novelist. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds, and has published over 20 collections of poetry, starting with Zoom! in 1989.
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Many of his poems concern his hometown in West Yorkshire; these are collected in Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems. He has translated classic poems including The Odyssey, the Alliterative Morte d'Arthur, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
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He has written several travel books including Moon Country and Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way. He has edited poetry anthologies including one on the work of Ted Hughes. He has participated in numerous television and radio documentaries, dramatisations, and travelogues.
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He will be reading primarily from his two recent poetry books, ‘Blossomise' and 'Never Good with Horses', and will be taking questions from the audience. He became Laureate in 2019, and since then has written poems to mark epoch-defining events like the deaths of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, and the first coronation in the UK in seventy years.
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Image credit: Paul Stuart Photography Ltd.
Friday 11 April 6pm
Open Mic with Nathaniel Oguns
Nathaniel Oguns
Nathaniel is an actor, starring in a British comedy series produced by BBC and A24, called ‘Dreaming Whilst Black’. He's also a presenter and a poet. He's lived in Kent for most of his adult life and was inspired to start poetry nights in Rochester for spoken word artists and poets called ‘Kent Dreams’ some years ago.
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Nathaniel will open the two-day festival with an open mic at 6pm. All welcome.
Friday 11 April 6:30pm
Our Poets
Bill Lewis
The Rainham Poetry Festival is pleased to include the book launch in Britain of Bill Lewis the shaman poet / El poeta chamán, a bilingual English/Spanish anthology of the work of one of Britain's finest poets, our own modern William Blake, whose work deserves better recognition that he has had so far.
Bill Lewis is an English artist, storyteller, poet, and mythographer. He was a founder-member of The Medway Poets and, later, also a member of the Stuckists art group.
Bill has developed a language beyond that primæval explosion, writing a corpus of poetry that deals with the modern world from the point of view of a working-class poet who mixes mythologies old and new to interpret modern Britain and the world beyond.
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Image credit: Emma Dewhurst
Caroline Bird
English poet and playwright Caroline Bird grew up in Leeds, but lives now in the Medway Towns. She has published eight collections of poetry. Her first, Looking Through Letterboxes (published in 2002, when she was just 15), is a collection of poems built on the traditions of fairy tales, fantasy and romance.
Her second collection, Trouble Came to the Turnip, was published in September 2006 to critical acclaim and her third, Watering Can, received a Poetry Book Society recommendation. Her fourth collection, The Hat-Stand Union, published in 2013, was described by Simon Armitage as "spring-loaded, funny, sad and deadly. In These Days of Prohibition (2017), was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award; as was The Air Year (2020). Her Rookie: Selected Poems was published in May 2022. Her latest collection is Ambush at Still Lake.
In 2012, she was an official poet at the London Olympics. Her poem “The Fun Palace” is on permanent display at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. A consummate performer as well as a brilliant poet, she engages with the world with both great sensitivity and good humour.​
Sheila Aldous
Sheila Aldous won the Welsh Poetry Competition in 2020 and lives on the banks of the River Teign, whose natural landscape, river life and local history is incorporated into her poems of love and loss. It was the history of the last invasion on English soil in Teignmouth that inspired Sheila to write Paper Boats, the Burning of Teignmouth her first collection published by Indigo Dreams.
Sheila has won several poetry and writing competitions: the Yeovil Prize, the NAWG, Riptide Journal and Happenstance 20. She has also been published in several literary journals, such as Acumen and Orbis. She will be reading us a selection of poems from her three collections published to date: While I was sleeping, Paper Boats and Patterns of All Made Things.
Charlotte Ansell
Charlotte Ansell lives with her family on a boat moored on the River Medway, having previously lived on a canal boat in Sheffield. Her latest book, Deluge, published by Flipped Eye, is her third collection, after You were for the Poem (2005) and After Rain (2009). She reflects on our modern life as seen from the perspective of an outsider, a displaced person in her own country.
She describes what she sees, with an eye that is both knowing and detached, a fragmented first-person narrative. Charlotte is a mesmerising performance poet. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Review, Mslexia, Now Then, Butcher’s Dog and several anthologies, including the Sheffield Anthology in 2012.
She won the Red Shed Open Poetry Competition, 2015, and was a finalist in the BBC Write Science competition in 2015 and in 2016, she won the Watermarks poetry competition in aid of flood victims in the Calder Valley. She helps to run Loose Muse London, a monthly showcase for women’s voices, with Agnes Meadows.
Adrian Masters
Adrian Masters is a Welsh journalist, presenter, author and politics journalist with ITV. He previously worked for the BBC, contributing to BBC Radio 4's Yesterday In Parliament, and many radio shows.
Adrian runs a personal blog where he discusses books, music, and art. His true passion is poetry, which he has written all his life but never published, so this is a rare occasion to know the work of this till-now closeted poet.
Adrian escapes the noise of politics and media for quiet moments of reflection, an Emily Dickinson-like character who knows all poets ultimately address themselves to an unreceptive god. Come and hear what a man immersed in British politics can write far from the madding crowd.
The readings will be followed by a discussion open to the public about their work as a meeting point between home and away, and the local and the global.
Saturday 12 April 2pm
Our Poets
Simon Armitage
We are delighted that the Poet Laureate will headline the Rainham Poetry Festival. Simon Armitage is an English poet, playwright, musician and novelist. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds, and has published over 20 collections of poetry, starting with Zoom! in 1989.
​
Many of his poems concern his hometown in West Yorkshire; these are collected in Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems. He has translated classic poems including The Odyssey, the Alliterative Morte d'Arthur, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
​
He has written several travel books including Moon Country and Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way. He has edited poetry anthologies including one on the work of Ted Hughes. He has participated in numerous television and radio documentaries, dramatisations, and travelogues.
​
He will be reading primarily from his two recent poetry books, ‘Blossomise' and 'Never Good with Horses', and will be taking questions from the audience. He became Laureate in 2019, and since then has written poems to mark epoch-defining events like the deaths of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, and the first coronation in the UK in seventy years.
​
Image credit: Paul Stuart Photography Ltd.
Patience Agbabi
Patience Agbabi is a British poet and performer who emphasises the spoken word. Her poetry addresses contemporary issues by means of a language that mixes classic forms such as the sonnet with the modern rhythms of rap. She describes herself as bicultural and bisexual.
She moves fluidly and nimbly between cultures and dialects. Her poetry collections include: R.A.W., Transformatrix, Bloodshot Monochrome, Telling Tales, and The Infinite.
As Canterbury Laureate from July 2009 to December 2010, Agbabi received an Arts Council grant to write a full-length poetry collection based on Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. This resulted in Telling Tales, which retells each tale in the Middle-English work to offer a 21st-century take on the characters.
Sam Riviere
Sam Riviere is an English poet, author and publisher. While at art school, Riviere played drums in indie band Le Tetsuo. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2009, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2012 for 81 Austerities.
Since 2015 he has run the independent press If a Leaf Falls Press in Edinburgh. Sam Riviere is a past master of taking and exploiting ‘found’ content and process and transforming it into poetry that captivates and unsettles. In his latest book, Conflicted Copy, he harnesses our anxiety about AI only to exploit it for his own extraordinary ends.
He uses Chat GPT-2, an open-source neural network to produce poems that, stripped of the usual authorial clutter, find themselves nonetheless cohering around a voice that speaks of the uncertainties, fears and desires of a world that is desperately, poignantly and recognisably human. Come and find out how AI and poetry coalesce, not as a threat, but as an ally to the poet´s mind.
Katy Carr
Katy Carr is a British singer-songwriter and musician known for her songs about Polish history. Although she was born in England, she lived in Poland for the first five years of her life.
Her album Paszport, a tribute to those who fought in World War II, won Best Concept Album from the Independent Music Awards in 2014. In 2016 she was given Poland's Pro Patria Medal.
She is an aviator and multi-instrumentalist: ukulele, banjolele, piano and vintage keyboard. Katy has released six albums of songs, inspired by untold stories from history and has performed to audiences across the UK, US and Europe.
She is delighted to be bringing her self-penned vocal melodies of William Blake’s collection of Songs of Innocence and of Experience in partnership with the Blake Society. Katy is currently planning a double album of Blake’s works.
Iona Warne
Iona from Maidstone, will read her poem inspired by the Poet Laureate ahead of Simon's performance.
Charlotte Mew
as brought to life by actress & author Di Sherlock
Charlotte Mew is an English poet whose work spanned the eras of Victorian poetry and Modernism. She was championed by Thomas Hardy, contributed to the ground-breaking Yellow Book, a literary periodical published in London from 1894 to 1899, and was as a regular of the Poetry Shop, an Edwardian bookshop and poetry publishers who was the centre of the London poetry scene in the early twentieth century.
Charlotte Mew won her first real attention with the publication of a poem, "The Farmer's Bride," in the Nation in 1912. Having previously only published seven pieces of poetry in various journals, this work established her literary reputation. She only published two books in her lifetime and her work fell into oblivion after her tragic suicide in 1929.
Two of Charlotte siblings suffered from mental illness and were committed to institutions, an experience that informs both her poetry and her life. Actress and playwright Di Sherlock will read a selection of Mew's poems, and Kevin Harrison will place them in the context of her life, highlighting key elements to understand her work and its relevance today.
Prize presentation to poems shortlisted in the Poetry competition held among sixth formers taking English in Medway schools.
Cllr Vince Maple, Leader of Medway Council will present prizes to the winners of the Medway Schools Poetry Competition.
This 2025 edition of the Rainham Poetry Festival is brought to you by the Goat Star Books team.
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