Culture Matters and Centrala Space, Birmingham are delighted to invite you to a full live reading of Al Hutchins' brilliantly bonkers poetry collection, Rebel Admin. With supporting shenanigans from Richard Arkwright, Duncan Jones, Alisha Kadir, Bobby Parker, Victoria Nimmo and others TBC. The launch takes place on the 9^th February 2024 from 6:30 to 9:00 PM GMT at Centrala Space, Unit 4 Minerva Works, 158 Fazeley St, Birmingham B5 5RT.

The event will be hosted jointly by Centrala Space and Culture Matters; it will feature a no-holds barred  reading of the full text by Al Hutchins and feature short support readings from local Culture Matters contributors past, present and future. Commissioning Editor Fran Lock will be master of ceremonies. And if you ask her nicely, she might bring cake!

The event is free to enter, but donations will be taken on the door for MAP, a charity providing medical aid to those affected by the on-going genocide in Palestine. The book will be available for purchase after the reading.

Rebel Admin is  a collection of visually intense, and syntactically jagged poems that create a sort of fragmentary cinema, one that works to signal the irrational absurdity of neoliberal culture, but also to disrupt its plausibly smooth and continuously scrolling script. Humour - of a uniquely warped and whacked-out variety - is the throughline of text, the constant current in its wild carnival of disorder. Against the numbing spectacle and sinister machinery of capitalism, Hutchins erects a savvy lyric vision that is part Mark E. Smith, part William Blake.

Al Hutchins has been described by Stewart Lee as a “howling faggot-and-pea-fuelled visionary”, which sounds about right to us. Al is a West Midlands-based poet, performing “stuff” since 1997: his rhythm, holler and tune-mongering thing, The Courtesy Group has been lauded by the likes of John Peel, Stuart Maconie and John Cooper Clarke. His poetry and fiction have been published by New River Press, Eccentric City, Tindal Street Press and proudly by Culture Matters!

Performer bios and further information will be added to our event pages, so do watch this space for news and this space for tickets.

Shellshocked Lives

by Viktoria Simanovski

These days I see an unjust world fragmented into fractions, thrusting children into battles and wars that are not of their making. In my film I try to express my hope for justice and understanding between people and between nations. We all start our journey as humans, but somewhere along the way we get tangled up in the web of nationalities, religions etc. It pains me to witness the transformation of children, who may once have been playmates, into pawns that are drawn into wars they never wished for. I really want people to allow themselves to see the difference between their own feelings and what is imposed from the outside.

Viktoria Simanovski is a member of a group called Just Building Bridges. It includes sanctuary seekers, refugees and asylum seekers in north-east England that has produced a series of photographs and short films on the theme of justice. The group itself is very diverse, from several different countries and continents. All of them are trying to ‘build bridges’ from a relatively marginalised position, and resettle peacefully and successfully in various local communities.

The photographs, films and zines made by the group cover a wide range of themes. There are local issues of waste, litter, and noise; bigger economic issues such as the fast fashion industry; and some very topical issues of global significance, such as the conflicts in the Ukraine and the Middle East.

The project was facilitated by Theresa Easton, lecturer in Fine Art at Newcastle University; Carl Joyce, photographer and filmmaker; and Michael Quille, writer and editor of Culture Matters. Thanks are due to Newcastle University and the Hatton Gallery Learning Space for the use of premises and equipment, and the Passionist Community for their financial support.

The exhibition materials are a fine body of authentic, heartfelt work. There are around 28 A4 photographs in A3 frames; 2 short films for playing on a loop; and a series of accompanying zines. If you are interested in displaying the exhibition, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Yer Ower Voices! is an anthology of dialect poetry in Welsh and English. The book is divided by geographical regional dialects: Swansea, The Valleys, Cardiff/ Newport, and North & West Wales. It is  the first anthology of its kind ever published. 

 The poets in Yer Ower Voices! show how dialect poetry may at one level be parochial but at its best how it can be universally relevant as well. Dialect poetry is also particularly capable of forcefully giving voice to whole communities in Wales who may have been represented in fiction and films to some extent, but have been largely invisible in the landscape of poetry.

This highly original anthology is unique in its presentation of the variety of dialect poetry written in Wales today. Unique, too, in the space it gives to poems written in dialects of Welsh. Yer Ower Voices! shows clearly how dialect writing can be relevant both locally and universally. Dialect poetry is particularly capable of forcefully expressing the experiences of social groups such as the working class, who have been traditionally under-represented as readers and writers of poetry. We hope that the book acts as a stimulus and increases both the reading and the writing of poetry in Wales.

Yer Ower Voices! Dialect poems in Welsh and English from Cymru, edited by Mike Jenkins, 148pps., £12, is available here.

The five winners of this year's Award are: Michael Lowkain, Jenny Mitchell, Ian Parks, Ross Walsh and Rob Walton. £100 will wing its wandering way to their worthy workers' wallets, and we'll produce the printed anthology by the end of November.

That will include the winning poems plus poems by Abigail Ottley, Cara L McKee, Steven Taylor, Peter Raynard, Lois Hambleton, Gwyneth Wilson, John F Keane, Mary Black, Ruth Aylett, Declan Geraghty, Julie Easley, Alan Weadick, Sarah Leavesley,  Angela Topping, Laura Taylor, Bavid Bleiman, John Morris, Owen Gallagher, Paul Francis, John Freeman, Laura Strickland, Joe Williams, Martin Hayes, Alan Morrison, Peadar O'Donoghue, and Moira Garland.

We'll send copies to everyone included in the anthology, and it'll be on sale in our Books section. Thanks to all who entered this year, for the sixth (and probably last) Bread and Roses Poetry Award.

Holberrys is a play about two Sheffield Chartists, Samuel and Mary Holberry, who helped organise the betrayed ‘physical force’ insurrection in the city in January 1840.

Samuel, a distillery worker, former agricultural worker and ex-soldier who had served in Ireland in the suppression of the Ribbonmen rebellion in 1833, and his wife Mary, were at the centre of militant campaigning and planning the rebellion. Their plans were divulged, with Samuel sentenced to four years imprisonment in prisons in Northallerton and York, where he died of consumption in 1842 at the age of 27. A hero of his time to working people, over 50,000 people attended his funeral procession in Sheffield.

The Holberrys’ story is illustrated using moving photographs taken by Ron McCormick during a schoolchildren’s re-enactment of the Chartist rising in Newport, South Wales in November 1839.

Holberrys dramatises the lives of Samuel and Mary and their years in Sheffield, ever a city of resistance and struggle. Its author, Chris Searle, is a teacher and it is a play for both the stage and the classroom, telling of an important episode in British history which is rarely remembered. It is free to download as a pdf, below.

England and Son is a one-man play written specifically for the political comedian Mark Thomas by award-winning playwright Ed Edwards (The Political History of Smack and Crack). It's a heartbreaking but funny horror story in which all the horrors are real.

Prepare for Mark to take you on a epic odyssey where disaster capitalism, Thatcherite politics and the end of Empire merge in the simple tale of a working-class boy who just wants his dad to smile at him and ruffle his hair.

This is the first play Mark has ever performed in that he has not written himself, and the play was in the top nine shows in the Sunday Times “must-see” list for this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

England and Son is on at Paine’s Plough Roundabout, Edinburgh 4^th – 28^th August.

There will be a sixty date tour after Endinburgh. To find a date near you visit Mark’s website here.

The mission of Culture Matters is to promote cultural democracy. This means providing articles and works of art for people whose views and voices go largely ignored by the ruling classes of late capitalist Britain. We aim to be a platform where the oppressed and exploited can develop and express their own intellectual and artistic output.

In the summer of 2023 no minority was more brusquely and effectively suppressed than republicans. Our new anthology, Dungheap Cockerel, has been created in a few weeks to counter that injustice with satires on monarchy in general and its latest incumbent in particular. It is available as a free downloadable pdf in the Poetry section, and we have also printed a few books, which are available at £9 each plus £2 p. and p. using the button below.

The mission of Culture Matters is to promote cultural democracy. This means providing articles and works of art for people whose views and voices go largely ignored by the ruling classes of late capitalist Britain. We aim to be a platform where the oppressed and exploited can develop and express their own intellectual and artistic output.

In the summer of 2023 no minority was more brusquely and effectively suppressed than republicans. Our new anthology, Dungheap Cockerel, has been created in a few weeks to counter that injustice with satires on monarchy in general and its latest incumbent in particular. 

—Fred Voss

Machine / Language by Martin Hayes with illustrations by Martin Rowson, ISBN 978-1-912710-59-1, £7 plus £3 p.and p.

Thirty poems in various forms and styles—rhyme, blank verse, free verse, villanelle, and ‘villanelle-vague’—tackle the seismic events and vicissitudes of recent years: Brexit, Grenfell and the “hostile environment”, the proroguing of Parliament, Boris Johnson’s shambolic premiership, Covid and the lockdowns, “Partygate”, Trump’s insurrection, the resistible rise of Keir Starmer, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Platinum Jubilee, the JUST STOP OIL protests, the death of Elizabeth Windsor and the suppression of republican expression during the mourning period, and the Coronation.

Wolves Come Grovelling primarily challenges the paradoxes of British citizenship and subjecthood, democracy and monarchy, which have never been resolved, not even during the Republic of the 1650s—a period in our history which tends to be airbrushed out in spite of Hamo Thornycroft’s imposing bronze statue of Oliver Cromwell serving as permanent reminder outside Parliament since 1897.

But for all the pomp and majesty of the Coronation there is still the whispering hope of republicanism among sections of the British populace which may yet ripen and come to cast a significant shadow on this Second Carolean Age.
 
Morrison writes in a rich, Miltonic voice, heavy with anger and prophecy.
                                                                                                 — Andy Croft

Wolves Come Grovelling, by Alan Morrison, 60 pps, ISBN 978-1-912710-57-7, available for £10 incl. p&p.