Liverpool’s literary and broadcasting worlds are set to converge later this month for a distinctive evening of poetry, conversation, and sound. On Friday 21 November, acclaimed poet, writer and broadcaster Professor Seán Street will appear at the Liverpool Friends Meeting House for a reading and discussion hosted by Liverpool Poetry Space. Tickets are free, and the evening promises not just a sharing of poems, but an exploration of how words and sound create meaning, connection, and memory.
Professor Street will read from his most recent collections, Journey into Space and Running Out of Time (Shoestring Press), as well as new, unpublished work. He’ll then join Liverpool poet Dr Pauline Rowe in conversation about the relationship between poetry, sound and radio — a dialogue that feels especially apt given his lifelong fascination with the spoken word. For Professor Street, poetry and broadcasting are both acts of deep listening; each depends on rhythm, silence and the human voice to evoke feeling and story.
Having spent decades in radio — as producer, presenter and scholar — Professor Street brings to his writing a distinctive sensibility, tuned to the resonances between thought and sound. His poetry often carries a quiet emotional charge, attentive to the way memory lingers in voices and places. As George Szirtes has observed, Street’s work “condenses a lifetime of celebratory and acute listening,” while The Times has praised his ability to “unearth loss, memory and redemption from English terrain like few other poets.”
The event also feels perfectly placed in Liverpool, a city defined by its sonic character — the movement of tides, the hum of docks, the voices carried across the Mersey. The Professor’s poems often dwell in such liminal spaces, where land meets water, and past meets present. His readings at such an intimate venue should echo that sensibility, blending the music of language with reflections on transmission, place and belonging.
So whether you’re drawn by the lure of lyric poetry, the nostalgia of radio, or the intimacy of live spoken word, An Evening With Seán Street offers an experience that invites you to listen differently — to the words, the silences, and everything in between.
An Evening With Seán Street
Friends Meeting House, School Lane, Liverpool, L1 3BT
Friday 21 November at 6pm.
Tickets
Note: Event is Friday, 21 November at 6.00pm