One of the best EPF’s there has been. 11 events, near enough 1000 people attending and 100s of poets too. It’s hard to describe the experience, going from night to night in this few weeks, venue to venue, performance to performance. It’s intense, and enthusiastic. The stress is minimal, physical. This year, as ever, but more than any year before, I felt the culture and mission of the festival was understood by almost everyone involved. That it is a space for play, risk, experiment, creatively. That it is supposed to be as communal, friendly, funny, welcoming as possible in experience, so the work can be as weird and strange as possible. That it doesn’t matter if the performances or poems are perfect, but that there is a culmination through each event of people building friendships through collaboration and experiment. This was consistent throughout each night in 2025.

I could write an essay about each night, the 125 people at the first Cypriot event, the weirdly perfect synchronicity of the Flanders event, the wildness of the Norwegian event etc.. but it’s best to just let the videos and photos speak for the thing. There is extensive documentation of everything at the links below, please do click on them and have a watch of some of the performances.

For my performances I collaborated with Krisjanis Zelgis (a pro wrestling match), Vanessa Onwuemezi (a sound poetry improvised duet), Katarina Krupickova, twice (two dance poetry pieces, the first a contemporary dance with abstracted actions, the second a spinning talking performance), Maria Barnas (an anti-comedy talking performance) and Tom Jenks (a new batch of our Proverb poems).