Poets from the floor welcome.
October's exhibition will be covers from Smokestack Books, a publishing house whose remit was to keep open a space for what is left of the radical poetic tradition in the twenty-first century. Smokestack championed unfashionable, socialist and left-field poets working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority.
Guest reader Andy Croft was born in Cheshire. He has worked in university adult education and community writing projects, in over 400 schools and a dozen prisons. He ran the Writearound Community Writing Festival in Cleveland (1989-2000), the T-junction International Poetry Festival in Middlesbrough (2014-18) and the Ripon Poetry Festival (2017-24). He wrote a monthly poetry column in the Morning Star from 2004-22, and for many years edited the ‘poem of the week’ feature in the paper. He helped run Teesside community-publishers Mudfog Books from 1993 to 2003, and edited Smokestack Books from 1004-2024. Writing Residencies include the Hartlepool Headland, the Great North Run, the Southwell Poetry Festival and the Combe Down Stone Mines Project.
Andy Croft’s books include Red Letter Days, A Weapon in the Struggle, Selected Poems of Randall Swingler, After the Party, Forty-six Quid and a Bag of Dirty Washing, Bare Freedom, The Years of Anger and The Privatisation of Poetry.
His books of poetry include Great North, Comrade Laughter, Ghost Writer, Sticky, Three Men on the Metro, Nineteen Forty-eight, Letters to Randall Swingler and The Sailors of Ulm. Edited collections include Red Sky at Night (with Adrian Mitchell), Not Just a Game (with Sue Dymoke), A Modern Don Juan (with Nigel Thompson), Smokestack Lightning and Release the Sausages: Poems for Keir Starmer.
‘laugh-out-loud funny’ (Guardian)
‘dreadfully old-fashioned’ (Tribune)
‘the Alexander Pope of the North’ (John Hartley-Williams)
‘puerile’ (TLS)
‘Swiftian vigour’ (Tears in the Fence)
