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Divine Messengers
Lucy Mercer writes for the Poetry School blog ahead of Divine Messengers, her weekend workshop on the literary use of dreams and the unconscious. Dreams! What interests me most about dreams is that they present worlds that are different but adjacent – and sometimes overlapping – with ours: imaginary inter-worlds, what the philosopher Henry Corbin…
Lucy Mercer
Review: ‘In Search of Equilibrium’ by Theresa Lola
In Search of Equilibrium (Nine Arches Press) is a deeply felt response to grief and a closely observed portrait of family, heartbreak, survival, and the evolution of personhood. Trauma is a peculiar thing. Once the immediate shock of a traumatic event or episode subsides, the world becomes a different place. For those who survive, death…
Niroshini
Ginkgo Prize 2019 Open for Entries!
The Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry, the biggest international prize for ecological, environmental and climate-concerned poetry, is now open and calling for entries from poets around the world competing to win £5,000 (first prize), £2,000 (2nd prize) or £1,000 (3rd prize). Organised by the Poetry School, and judged by award-winning Mexican poet, activist, diplomat and former president of International PEN Homero Aridjis, alongside…
Poetry School
The Big Issues
I began thinking about writing this blog on the day of the mass murder of Muslims in New Zealand. Just how do you begin to respond as a poet to something like this? And in the UK, and around the world, there have been similar atrocities. We’re in this mess of seemingly endless Brexit, with…
Katrina Naomi
‘Phone Call Home from my Daughter in Chiscani, Christmas Eve 2018’
Why I want to write about the pig’s head hanging from a branch in the yard, the cat that was beaten for killing a bird, the man who one night lay down on the track, or the dog you found frozen to death in the snow, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s because of our paths:…
Maggie Sawkins
‘river’
The river is a dark bone, a long narrow forearmwith direction which makes an ease of sorts. The river is a soil-dark bone full of the small, the odd,all the names it wasbefore it was river, all the names. Plucky light flips the surface,larvae hold firm, jellied and hard.Mouths open in the reed beds,longest, oldest…
Sarah Westcott
Review: ‘Small Inheritances’ by Belinda Zhawi
Belinda Zhawi’s debut pamphlet, Small Inheritances (Ignition), maps out the spaces where the speaker has lived, tracing a way back through the ‘dregs of south east london’ to a childhood in Zimbabwe. The first section, set in Thamesmead and Peckham and titled ‘small inconveniences’, re-maps the streets and estates to reveal the struggles and longings of…
Danne Jobin
Pub Chats: clinic
In today’s Pub Chat, we’re joined by Andy Parkes, Poetry School Programme Manager and, alongside Rachael Allen and Sam Buchan-Watts, editor at trendsetting independent arts platform clinic. Hello there! What are you drinking? A pint of Guinness, in nostalgia for clinic’s early days as a workshop group in a noisy Irish pub in South East…
Poetry School
Poetry of Parenting Playlist: Thirteen For Now
Fiona Benson, author of the brilliant Vertigo & Ghost, and tutor of the Poetry School course Writing Childhood, Writing Parenthood, presents an unmissable Poetry of Parenting Playlist. (1) Kathleen Jamie, ‘Ultrasound’ This gorgeous, unsurpassable sequence in Jizzen (Picador, London: 1999) travels from ultrasound (‘Second sight / a seer’s mothy flicker, an inner sprite’) through the ‘difficult giving’ to ‘the first…
Fiona Benson
Announcing the MA in Writing Poetry Scholarship
We’re delighted to announce that Newcastle University is offering a scholarship award for 2019 entry worth £7,400 (full fees) for an outstanding applicant to the Poetry School / Newcastle MA in Writing Poetry. The Scholarship will be awarded on a competitive basis to applicants who have already accepted an offer of a place for 2019/20 entry…
Poetry School
Review: ‘Rabbit’ by Sophie Robinson
Rabbit (Boiler House) deals with the struggle to connect in a globalised, social-media age, where our language is overwhelmed by the clichés of celebrities and advertisements, and our conception of friendship, success and love is as a shallow performance. The fierce, plaintive, stylish poems in Rabbit are about the experience of unbelonging and being distanced…
Rosanna Hildyard
‘A great, dark, soft thing’
The day passes and, though not for lack of trying, no words come. It grows dark; I tire with the sun and go to bed. As soon as I have turned out the lights, however, words begin to string themselves together like fairy lights across my mind. They are late – I expected them hours…
Anna Veprinska
Self, Place, World
Ahead of his monthly course in Birmingham, the city’s poet laureate Richard O’Brien writes about the concentric circles of ‘self’, ‘place’ and ‘world’. Poetry is always a kind of dialogue between the internal and the external. We write out of, if not necessarily ‘about’ in a confessional sense, our personal lived experience of reality —…
Richard O'Brien
Review: ‘The Built Moment’ by Lavinia Greenlaw
Lavinia Greenlaw’s The Built Moment (Faber) grapples with the slipperiness of time, memory, loss and the downwards slope of her father’s dementia. In two neat sequences, these poems gather together the loose, unruly strands of the aging self, along with the grieving observer, and spin them into something beautiful. The first sequence of poems, ‘The…
Jade Cuttle
Review: ‘The Gaelic Garden of the Dead’ by MacGillivray
Each new MacGillivray collection should be welcomed for its far-out linguistic verve, spiky music and intellectual dynamism. There are few poets writing today as utterly sui generis in their style – like poets of the British Poetry Revival (and I’m thinking particularly of Barry MacSweeney and his Book of Demons) all we can do as…
Richie McCaffery
Poetry for Change
It starts with words. The lies and the truths. Politicians know how to use them: to deceive, persuade, or both. With new platforms for the arts, poets have the chance to counter falsity, to spread their words more than ever. In designing this course, I looked for poems that called for change: their rich imagery,…
Elizabeth Parker
Review – ‘The Quick’ by Jessica Traynor
At the heart of Jessica Traynor’s second collection, The Quick (Dedalus Press), is a nine-poem sequence commissioned, so the notes tell us, by the Salvage Press, for the 350th anniversary of Swift’s birth and ‘written in response to the provocation, “What might Swift write about now?”’ Traynor’s ‘A Modest Proposal’, like the Swiftian satire it is…
Jake Morris-Campbell
Review: ‘Kingdomland’ by Rachael Allen
About two-thirds of the way through Kingdomland, Rachael Allen’s debut collection, the text neatly encapsulates some of its key motifs – oppressive heat, procreation, bodily angst – in a single stroke: The day is an oven. I float outwards in a concentric circle. I will know the pattern of your knee. I sit by the river…
Humphrey Astley
Radical Butchery Studio
“Futurists believed that the constraints of syntax were inappropriate to modern life and that it did not truly represent the mind of the poet…However, the Futurists were not truly abolishing syntax. White points out that since “The OED defines ‘syntax’ as ‘the arrangement of words in their proper forms) by which their connection and relation…
Sascha Akhtar
We Cannot Stop the Rumbling Trains
I live in Nanjing, just down the road from the Chaotian palace and, in the other direction, the Hanzhongmen section of the city’s ancient wall. This section of the wall is mostly in bits now, but it’s a lovely spot, opening up into an area for gathering with friends. As the sun sets on the…
David Tait
The Convergence of Languages in Latinx Poetry
One of the elements that makes Latinx poetry so rich is the many cultures that come together in a single poem. The convergence of cultures can take on many forms, and for Latinx poets, who come from a wide range of backgrounds, the results are endlessly varied. In the forthcoming Poem(a)s Studio: Reading Contemporary Latinx…
Natasha Hakimi Zapata
Review: ‘Milk Tooth’ by Martha Sprackland
The title of Martha Sprackland’s new pamphlet, Milk Tooth (Rough Trade), might denote a wish or an ache, something missing, a talisman wrought from the body, a souvenir of pain. A reminder that we are all animals of a sort, struggling for one or more kinds of survival. Milk Tooth opens with an epigraph from…
Maria Sledmere
Non-Executive Board Member Position Open!
Poetry School is a national arts organisation providing inspiring tuition and opportunities for poets and poetry audiences. We were founded in 1997 by poets Mimi Khalvati, Jane Duran and Pascale Petit. Since our earliest days, our courses and activities have encouraged poets and poetry to flourish. With established teaching centres throughout England as well as…
Poetry School
Review: ‘Shadow Dogs’ by Natalie Whittaker
Natalie Whittaker’s Shadow Dogs (ignition press) introduces a powerful, controlled new voice. The twenty-one poems collected here are often short and restrained but, to steal from the pamphlet’s title, the elegant sentences and striking images cast enormous shadows, conjuring something much bigger than themselves. Because of the care with language and the sense of a lived…
Jonathan Edwards
Review: ‘Spikenard’ by Yvonne Reddick
Red in tooth and claw though the setting for many of her poems are, Yvonne Reddick evades any easy categorisation in Spikenard (Smith | Doorstop). Just as she did in its two predecessors, Deerhart and Translating Mountains, Reddick writes a poetry that bucks, rears and darts, but is also defined by the steady and deep-sinking effect…
Patrick Davidson Roberts