hello again,

it’s been a while

this is alone together

I am always fascinated by the ways poetry comes to you.

it always finds you, in multitudinous and multivarious ways

in fact, it would be safe to say. there are as many different ways for poetry to find a poet, as there are for your poems to find me.

todays episode, shows the work of a poet I liked the work of. that’s about it.

no theme, no stimulus word, no prestige... at least not yet.  They are a verse maker from North Carolina, the far side of the pond from me. with a hallucinatory and sonically fluid work that I thought looked tasty on the page, but delicious on the ear.

Her Name is Nicole Verrone, and I asked her to read  a bit from her Debut nest of stars and tell me a bit about how the poems came to be.

Take a listen.

Loss Hurts.
It just does.
So let’s be real for a sec.
Let’s talk about it.

Poems and thoughts By Casey Bailey
Samples of Lawrence Brownlee and Jason Moran Via NPR
Sound by think Write Fly

It's ThinkWriteFly's Turn to share some Poems, He's taking his pen for a walk.

How Locked down are you?

Right now?

Are we shielding?

Do you, like me, keep misplacing your mask?

This is a moment, a strange one to experience.

So it was a pleasure to work with a poet and a poem that captures it. Whether in the form of a photograph. or a glow fly in a bottle.

Poetry By Jessica Mookherjee, Sound By ThinkWriteFly.

I can’t tell…

Whether its the campfire,

the neon of the City,

or our phone screens.

But, this is Episode 3.

And it’s Glowing.

Featuring the Verse and Voices of Louise McStravick, Rhiannon Fidler and Suna Afshan.

Featuring the Poetry of :Cynthia Rodriguez, Lerah Mae Barcenilla & Leila Khanem Howl.

Sound: ThinkWriteFly

For the first experiment in this project, I ask some fellow poets to write on the theme of Quiet. This is what they had to say.

featuring the work of Kibriyah Mehrban, Eleanor Rushton Kamil Mahmood, Shaun Hill, and Emma Thompson

Sound by ThinkWriteFly

next episodes theme is: ‘Arboretum’
Scribble something, try it out, when you are ready, find your voice recorder app on your phone.
say your name, a title ( if your poem has one) and perform.

email the sound file to Contact@versefirst.org
Inbox is open from the 27th April to the 1st of May.

Looking Forward to hearing what you write.

We gather together in Coffee shops, Pub back rooms, Theater spaces art galleries sometimes even living rooms to speak verse to listening ears.
It's what we live for, we wordsmiths. We find ourselves in the undulating gaze of an audience, validate our art on the mics and stages of venues as much as we do the Pages of books and magazines.

The stages are quiet now.

We find ourselves asking if a poem, unspoken, in a closed book, in an isolated room, is still a poem?

VerseFirst is trying an experiment. To invite poets to read for an audience, they can neither see nor hear. I'm inviting poets to write and perform poems on a theme each week that will be broadcast into the ears of hundreds individually, rather than hundreds all at once. We will start small. But.

If it works, we will invite more poets to the virtual mic.

Culminating in weekly poetry session open to all, with poets across the world contributing performances, writing for and to each of us shut-in at home.

We have no choice in isolation.

No choice but be alone in this, for the moment.

But at least we can be alone together.