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We are hiring!
We are working with recruiters in Salt Lake City to see who wants to join our friendly team in Canada Water as our new Digital Programming and Marketing Assistant, and an exceptional Finance and Operations Officer to work closely with the executive director to ensure the growth and development of the School at this exciting…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, and The Poetry School launch The Laurel Prize
We are delighted to be able to announce the launch of The Laurel Prize and honoured to be collaborating with Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage on one of his headline projects. The Laurel Prize will be an award for the best collection of environmental, ecopoetry, or nature poetry. The Prize will further the discourse around climate…
Poetry School
Hell and Back: Writing Addiction and Recovery
I am anxious to not use the term confessional poetry when talking about my upcoming course, because it seems to me a loaded term which some poets delight in and others shy away from. I don’t want this course to be an exercise in naval-gazing or self-indulgence – there already seems to be enough of…
Keith Hutson
The Poetics of Space after Bachelard
“A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” My house is sometimes a chair I sit on in a different country, a tent, a beach, the woods I return to in photographs. My grandmother’s hand as it stirred her black tea. My children’s skin on my lips…
Agnieszka Studzinska
Measure a Circle, Beginning Anywhere: Poetry Through a Fortean Lens
The Fortean Times has been my holiday treat for quite some time now. What could be better than spending a journey engaged in the peculiar, peripheral and puzzling? Let’s get some of the stereotypes out of the way: tinfoil hats; incessant alien abductions; a willingness to believe any madcap conspiracy on offer; an obsession with The X-Files. (That…
Caleb Parkin
Spring 2020 Term Courses Are Now LIVE
We are delighted to announce that our Spring 2020 courses are now UP and BOOKABLE! Below is a quick guide of all of the courses that have opened for booking today. Note: We expect many of our courses to sell out very fast, so make sure to secure your place on your favourite course or courses today!…
Sarala Estruch
Review: ‘Whip-Hot & Grippy’ by Heather Phillipson
Heather Phillipson’s Whip-Hot & Grippy is a nightmarish, lurid inventory of news cycles, junk food, sex, bodies, and failed communication ‘come to thrash the living daylights out of you’. If 2016 was the year that Heather Phillipson ‘lost [her] sense of humour’ (by her own account), 2019 is the year she has channelled nihilism and…
Jenna Clake
Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critic Review: ‘Whereas’ by Layli Long Soldier
Layli Long Soldier’s debut poetry collection, Whereas (Picador) roots through the vocabularies it employs, carefully tracing its linguistic inheritances. Long Soldier is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, and is keenly aware of the power – and lack thereof – that language can command. Whereas is split into two parts. Part I, ‘These Being…
Joanna Lee
Xriss Xross: A Report
Poetry can spring up in the most unlikely places – even Zone 3. For Xriss Xross, a free one-day writing festival, the Poetry School took over RAW Labs, an airy studio space at a fringe of the DLR that many Londoners (this one included) will never have visited before. It was the perfect setting for…
Tristram Fane SaundersApplications open for paid internship at the Poetry School
About the role At the Poetry School, we believe that a career in the literary world should be an option for anyone, regardless of background, and not just the privileged few. What is more, we believe in true diversity of voices and that this can only be achieved by an industry whose workforce more accurately…
Helen Galliano
Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critic Review: ‘The Caiplie Caves’ by Karen Solie
Time and place are the central nodes of Karen Solie’s The Caiplie Caves (2019), a three-part poetic narrative traversing human life, both historical and modern, through the spatial lens of the geographic region around the titular Caiplie Caves. Solie begins with an invocation of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing: ‘The past is not for living…
Sarah-Jean Zubair
Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critic Review: ‘The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here’ by Vidyan Ravinthiran
Vidyan Ravinthiran’s second collection – a private sonnet series to his wife, the writer Jenny Holden – is at once a succession of private missives to a private love, and arranged, as a sequence, to portray the sum total of the day to day in a marriage between two writers, a brown person and a…
Stephanie Sy-Quia
Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critic Review: ‘Surge’ by Jay Bernard
It is noteworthy that the first word of the opening poem in Surge (Chatto), Jay Bernard’s searing debut, is remember. Here is a collection against forgetfulness; a refutation of any presumption that the past is the past at all. Set between the pillars of two disasters, the New Cross Fire of 1981, which claimed the…
Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Written With a Wet Rock
When writing is hard and the poems are turning stony-faced and slow, I tell myself there are so many things harder and slower to hold onto than a poem: first, a breath, and second, a stone. I take one good, deep breath and let it go. Then I take one good, deep lump of time…
Holly Corfield Carr
Review: ‘Flèche’ by Mary Jean Chan
How do you learn to love when you’re versed in the ways of war? Equal parts sinister Aesop’s Fable, lived experience, and fairy tale with a twist, Flèche invites readers into a labyrinth of longing. There’s an ongoing war across generations, between mother and daughter, in Mary Jean Chan’s debut collection, Flèche. But the battles…
Zakia Carpenter-Hall
The Personable Political
So you’re in a writing workshop, one of those all day affairs where you do some exercises in the morning and have a communal critique in the afternoon. You’ve written 3 bad poems, 1 seed of something, and poem that flew from your pen or fingertips so naturally that you have no idea where it…
David Tait
How Poetry Burns
I had just turned 18 when I moved out of my childhood home and into an apartment with my boyfriend. Although I hoped my young relationship would last, there was something in me that said my treasured objects would be safer at home. Built by my grandfather for my grandmother after World War II, it…
Christina Thatcher
Memory, History, Loss, & Gains
If, like me, you believe that uncovering untold histories – whether personal, familial, or national – is important, and a vital part of the poet’s work, then join me for a day of reading and discussing poets who do just that. A few months ago, I was in a workshop with Bernardine Evaristo and the…
Sarala Estruch
A Far-Off Land: Finding More Folklore
In the west, epic myths, remnants of religions past, are revered, re-translated and researched, but folktales and fairy tales are often written off as children’s stories. Scrappy, grisly, lowbrow and deceptively simple, many of them do indeed serve as warnings to children: don’t wander alone in the woods, boast or steal. But these stories, passed…
Kirsten Irving
Review: ‘Reckless Paper Birds’ by John McCullough
To understand the weight of being bodied, All the swollen and tender exchanges That ground me here among the living (‘A Floating Head’) There is a powerful sense of tension between body and soul in John McCullough’s absorbing third collection, Reckless Paper Birds. The human body and brain can be a prison; they are both…
Maria Taylor
Review: ‘Handling Stolen Goods’ by Degna Stone
Interrogating the prejudice of race and class, Degna Stone’s spellbinding third pamphlet, Handling Stolen Goods (Peepal Tree Press), reveals a disturbing bond between the body and the world around it, and strives to break this down through bold, determined struggle. Whilst human interactions stand at the heart of Stone’s poems (‘We spend our time having…
Jade Cuttle
Review: ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ by Richard Osmond
Richard Osmond’s Rock, Paper, Scissors is a collection wherein violence and trauma has disrupted the social fabric to the extent that reality becomes a game of signs. Like the trickster of myths and fables, this collection undermines authority and convention. The three principle signs of this collection are excerpts from Beowulf, Qur’ānic extracts and Osmond’s…
Zakia Carpenter-Hall
Review: ‘Girlhood’ by Julia Copus
There is a theory in earth sciences known as the Gaia Hypothesis that propounds that the earth and everything upon it (though, crucially, perhaps not including ‘us’) acts as a synergetic, self-regulating organism. The idea being that the earth acts as its own immune system, but also as its own ‘reset’, so to speak. Dangers…
Patrick Davidson Roberts
Twisted Love
In one of his Lunch Poems, Frank O’Hara describes reading the poetry of a new friend. Is this love? he asks, sounding uncertain. He feels held in the hands of the poem, experiencing poetry as a form of intimacy or attempted intimacy. This course came about because I realised, simply, that the love poem –…
Becky Varley-Winter
A Song for Occupations: In Praise of Work
What shall we do with work? Curse it, hate it, make escape plans from it, call in sick to it, write apologetic e-mails to it, still we find, every morning, we have to do it. And more than that, work does things to us: decides what time we’ll rise, how well we sleep, the folk…
Jonathan Edwards