I crawled on my hands and knees
for a thousand years over broken glass
and molten concrete streets
just to tell you a poem.
MIGGY ANGEL
WE BLEED INK
with John Freer//
POEMS PUBLISHED ONLINE//
Sundog Lit//
Night Nurse, Open Skylight, The Song
Dead King Magazine//
The Hard Cell, Green Juice Jewel Box Methadone Program
Queen Mob's Teahouse//
3AM Magazine//
The Message, Beholden, The Workshop and The Tenure
Kill Author//
Zouch Magazine//
The Recusant//
GRIME KERBSTONE PSALMS
published by Celandor Books//
The act of calling myself a poet was really an act
of survival for me. Throughout my life I’ve been subject
to the classifications and diagnoses of others –
mental-health, class, race, and addiction related, etc.
The only diagnosis that ever really worked for me was when I called myself a poet.
On the 3rd June 2013,
Grime Kerbstone Psalms was launched
in Nottingham city centre, and the event was attended by around 100 guests.
Since publication, it has sold around 500 copies worldwide, and
is considered by many to be a classic collection of the U.K. poetry scene.
“There are not nine million stories in the city. There is one story, with nine million endings, and nine million ways to begin.”
- Grime Kerbstone Psalms
“Miggy Angel I like your style!”
– John Cooper Clarke
Poetry to me is the very fabric of all things, the ground zero of existence. It’s the state of the universe, of the busy street outside your window, of every cell in your body. It’s fire and ice, birth and death and all points and co-ordinates in-between and beyond. I see everything as poetry. The way every thing resides beside the other, or doesn’t reside and is mortally restless, how it congeals or fractures, how it holds together or breaks apart. The biggest-kept secret in poetry is that you are the poem. I am the poem. We are the poem. Everything and everywhere is the poem. Poetry is writing us as we speak. Shhhh TELL EVERYONE.
BIO'S ARE REALLY AWFUL BUT HERE GOES//
Miggy Angel is a poet, workshop facilitator, event organiser, compere, and editor.
Miggy is the author of the poetry collection Grime Kerbstone Psalms published by Celandor books.
Miggy hosts and organises Nottingham's longest running monthly poetry event, Speech Therapy, and is the facilitator of the Do Or Die Poets (a weekly creative writing workshop for people in addiction recovery).
He is the poetry/fiction editor and founder of Burning House Press, and editor/designer of The Arsonist Magazine.
Miggy Angel is one half of the musical project,
We Bleed Ink, with producer/musician extraordinaire John Freer.
Miggy Angel is a South Londoner, who now lives in Nottingham, England.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO BOOK MIGGY FOR A POETRY PERFORMANCE, OR TO HOST AN EVENT, OR EVEN IF YOU JUST WANT TO SAY HELLO - PLEASE USE THE CONTACT FORM
PROVIDED BELOW//
As working-class kids knocking about on council estates all you have is your tongue, your larynx, your gnarled alphabet. Spiel is an act of survival. Every kid I knew growing up was a poet by another name. We splayed the alphabet daily. That’s where I learnt everything I need to know about rhythm and emphasis and repetition and refrain and the silences and crawl-spaces between tenses that hold a lit match up to life and death. The kid who can blag for a life-time discovers eternity inside the black hollow of his mouth. I’ve seen people murdered by glottal stops. Verbal wounds you’ll spend a lifetime removing guttural-shrapnel from. The bruised air of a girl holding her breath for infinity. The beauty and fragility of a self-worth erected upon nothing more than the lightning dynamo of a street-kid’s hyperbole and rhetoric and bravado taught me every single thing I need to know about poetry.
MIGGY ANGEL IS ALSO A PHOTOGRAPHER//
