PROJECTS AND COMMISSIONING

Xriss Xross is a new, free festival of inter-disciplinary workshops exploring multiple creative exchanges, experimentations, and explorations of boundaries. The unique festival programme of multiple overlapping sessions loosely link together via interactive poetry creation, happenings, workshops, and events, fusing creative writing and poetry workshops with performance, music, and art, trade, travel, immigration, forgotten stories, and unheard voices past and present. The festival forms part of the Join the Docks summer festival, utilising the Royal Docks’ 150 year heritage as a global centre for trade and a crucial meeting point of different cultures and languages.

OnSide Youth Zones work with over 20,000 young people aged 8-19 and up to 25 with a disability, in the most deprived areas of the UK. Poetry School is partnering with OnSide to deliver a project led by Yomi Sode to embed poetry in London’s first Youth Zone in Barking and Dagenham. Young people will create poems, engage in sharing evenings at the Youth Zone to showcase their work, perform, write and have fun. Outcomes focus on increased emotional resilience, confidence, well-being and articulacy as well as the nurturing of employment skills. Long term the project will be expanded throughout the network, co-ordinated by Poetry School and each Youth Zone will be able to run its own poetry group, young people being taught the skills to sustain and manage the project themselves.

Running 2-3 times a term, Write Ahead is a free poetry workshop series giving those curious about our classes a sample of what we do, creating access for individuals who traditionally have been excluded from taking Poetry School workshops. Every Write Ahead is led by a different facilitator, and comprises quick-fire writing activities, an introduction to some contemporary poems, discussion, feedback, and a chance to talk to staff and current students. Write Aheads take up to 20 students, plus 5 reserve spaces for walk-ups and local residents. Working with a writing group can be a nerve-racking experience, and Write Aheads are the ideal way to work through those wobbly first forays into poetry, feeling confident enough to explore a creative writing practice further. In 2019, Write Ahead guest tutors include Abi Parry, Ali Lewis, Joey Connolly, Bridget Minamore, Ella Frears and Theresa Lola.

Poetry in Aldeburgh’s third festival of poetry, co-curated by Poetry School and poet Paul Stephenson. In November 2018, over 100 of today’s most exciting poets from across the UK came to the Suffolk coast to celebrate all things poetry with a weekend of 45 workshops, events, pop-up performances, exhibitions and poetry-themed walks and swims.. Themes included climate change, queer identity, translation, art and more, celebrating major anniversaries and fusing film with poetry and dance. www.poetryinaldeburgh.org

A unique collaboration with the Verve Poetry Festival, the Verve Annual Performance Lecture invites a poet, not necessarily a seasoned lecturer, to create a 50 min presentation fusing academic discourse with poetry and spoken word on a subject of their choosing, utilising a wide variety of different strategies – such as instrumental performance, slide presentations, improvisation, film, audience participation – with the employment of poetry/poetry performance at its core. In February 2019, Anthony Anaxagorou spoke to a crowd of hundreds at the Old Repertory Theatre, deconstructing some of the ways ‘performance poetry’ has been defined in both traditional and contemporary periods.

A micro-commissioning project. We put up five pots of £750 and asked poets, artists and promoters to tell us how they’d spend the money on innovative ways to get poetry in front of audiences. We funded a scratch spoken word show, a poetry walking tour, a stately home residency, a political poetry email chain letter and a poetry and dance piece.

The New North Poets mentoring programme is part of the Northern Writers’ Awards organised by New Writing North. The programme, devised and delivered by the Poetry School, and judged by a guest judge each year, is open to poets who are yet to publish a full-length collection. The four winning poets receive a structured package of support, including a writing residency at the Garsdale Retreat, one-to-one mentoring from the poet Clare Pollard, a workshop series with a range of exciting tutors, and publication in a digital anthology.

A poetry residency programme, in association with London Parks and Gardens Trust. For the last five years we have placed poets in gardens around London during LPGT’s London Open Garden Squares Weekend, providing poet-in-residence training and guidance, which has resulted in readings and a CAMPUS pamphlet. In 2019, we’ll be putting poets into a Poetry Quarter in Central London as well as across the capital.

Open writing prompts. To celebrate National Poetry Writing Month and to help the global participants, we called upon thirty Poetry School tutors to offer up writing prompts. These were published daily on CAMPUS and also on the Mslexia Magazine website, inviting the resulting poetry to be shared online too.

A digital anthology series. For the last year we’ve been bringing together the work created in our projects, courses and commissions into pamphlet-length editions of poetry, available online, increasing the reach of the poets and inspiring creativity across users of CAMPUS.

Our first podcast. Ryan Van Winkle is your guide in The Line Break, an interview series delving into the writing practices of celebrated poets and offering up prompts to get listeners’ own poetry onto the page. So far Ryan has interviewed Philip Gross, Kwame Dawes, Mary Ruefle and Hilary Menos, and all editions are available to download online and offered by the Scottish Poetry Library podcast channel.