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Bang Said The Gun

With guests Matt Harvey and Brian Patten

Bang Said The Gun is poetry for people who don’t like poetry.

Voted the best poetry night in the UK by The Times, Bang Said The Gun has made poetry cool again. A rollercoaster of emotions, it’s loud, raucous, political, trivial, serious and very funny. Normal rules do not apply here. Featuring a rich mix of the best and freshest talent, they will grab you by the collar and drag you into another world.

‘It’s like mud wrestling with words’
KATE TEMPEST

‘Bang Said The Gun is a vortex of energy and enthusiasm’
ANDREW MOTION

‘Like all the best things in life, Bang Said The Gun is done with commitment, belief and passion.’
PHIL JUPITUS

Matt Harvey

Writer, poet, enemy of all that’s difficult and upsetting, Matt’s way with words has taken him from Totnes to the Wimbledon Tennis Championships via Saturday Live, the Edinburgh Festival and the Work section of the Guardian. He is host of Wondermentalist – Radio 4’s comedy-infused, musically enhanced interactive poetry cabaret – and author of The Hole in the Sum of my Parts, Where Earwigs Dare and Mindless Body Spineless Mind. He is married, with one wife. They have two sons.

Matt is the creator of Empath Man, who had his own mini-series on Radio 4, and his recent Edinburgh show also garnered excellent reviews.

‘Very funny…’
INDEPENDENT

‘…not only funny but tender and true’
GUARDIAN

‘fabulously understated’ 
DORSET ECHO
 

 

Brian Patten

Brian Patten made his name in the 1960s as one of the Liverpool Poets, alongside Adrian Henri and Roger McGough. Their main aim was to make poetry immediate and accessible for their audience, and their joint anthology, The Mersey Sound (1967), has been credited as the most significant anthology of the twentieth century for its success in bringing poetry to new audiences, and is now a Penguin Modern Classic.

Brian Patten’s poems have since been translated into many European languages.

Brian Patten was born in 1946 in Liverpool, and grew up in a working class neighbourhood, now long demolished. He left school at fifteen, becoming a junior reporter on The Bootle Times, where he wrote a popular music column. One of his first pieces included a report about McGough and Henri. At sixteen he edited and produced the magazine underdog, which gave a platform to the underground poets in Liverpool at that time, and which went on to print the work of international poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Andrei Voznesensky.

His first solo collection was Little Johnny’s Confessions 1967, published when he was twenty-one years old. Since then he has published numerous collections, including Vanishing Trick (1976) Armada (1996), which includes some of his most striking poems, focusing on the death of his mother and his memories of childhood. Penguin publish his Selected Poems and Harper Perennial one of his most important books, The Collected Love Poems.

Patten is also well-known for his best-selling poetry collections for children, most famously Gargling with Jelly (1985) and Juggling with Gerbils (2000). His collection for children and adults, The Blue and Green Ark: An Alphabet for Planet Earth, won a Cholmondeley Award in 2002. He has also written a novel for children, Mr Moon’s Last Case (1975), which won an award from the Mystery Writers of America Guild. Brian Patten also edits poetry anthologies, most notably The Puffin Book of Modern Children’s Verse. His latest book for children is The Big Snuggle-up with illustrations by Nicola Bayley His life story as one of the three Liverpool poets is told by Phil Bowen in A Gallery To Play To: The Story of The Mersey Poets and a critical study of his work, Brian Patten, was published by Northcote House in 1997.

He has been honoured with the Freedom of the City of Liverpool and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of both Liverpool University and John Moores University.

VENUE: EXETER PHOENIX