Blog
All of our Blog Posts
How I Did It: Forward First Collection – Shivanee Ramlochan on ‘All the Dead, All the Living’ from Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting
Welcome to the second instalment of our Forward Prizes First Collection ‘How I Did It’ series. We asked the poets shortlisted for this year’s Felix Dennis Prize to explain the process behind one of their award-shortlisted poems. Shivanee Ramlochan talks about the wondrous experience of attending Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago, which sparked her…
Shivanee Ramlochan
Ancient Tongues and Hybrid Texts
Ahead of his upcoming course in Bristol, Rowan Evans writes about the intricate link between ancient languages and experimental poetry. Language started shaking ok the day started shaking ok words are a matter of shaking – Caroline Bergvall, Drift (Nightboat Books, 2014). This Autumn I begin practice-based PhD research at Royal Holloway,…
Rowan Evans
How I Did It: Forward First Collection – Phoebe Power on ‘Rina’ from Shrines of Upper Austria
Welcome to the first instalment of our Forward Prizes First Collection ‘How I Did It’ series. We asked the poets shortlisted for this year’s Felix Dennis Prize to explain the process behind one of their award-shortlisted poems. Phoebe Power gives details below on her writing process, and on how she created ‘Rina’. The Forward Prizes…
Phoebe Power
Poetry School Bank Holiday Sale!
Make the most of your bank holiday weekend with the Poetry School sale. Take 25% off selected Poetry School courses with voucher code BANKSALE! Face-to-Face Courses Fuck Lyric: Politics and Poetic Form with Joey Connolly (London, 10 week)): Join the fight and write new, original poems in support of poetry’s resistance against conservative conformity. Was £90. Now £67.50!…
Poetry School
How I Did It: Eric Gregory Award – Annie Katchinska on ‘Snow Festival’
Welcome to the second instalment of our Eric Gregory Award 2018 ‘How I Did It’ series. We asked the winners of this year’s awards to explain the process behind one of their award-winning poems. Here, Annie Katchinska writes about ‘Snow Festival’ and “learning how to write again”. The Eric Gregory Awards will close for entries on…
Annie Katchinska
Fuck Lyric
Ahead of his upcoming online course, Joey Connolly writes on the politics of ‘the lyric’. In an unnamed poem in her 2017 book Fourth Person Singular, Nuar Alsadir writes: ‘On the local platform at 86th Street waiting for a 6 Train, I noticed, written on a column in thick Sharpie, “Fuck Lyric:” I…
Joey Connolly
‘My ghost you needn’t look for’ – Searching for Robinson Jeffers
The Venice of my birth, a far cry from Casanova’s Serene Republic, at whose spectre tourists chase to the tune of hundreds of euros a day, had already been pimped out to cruise-ships by the time I had learned to walk in the late 1980s. A stone’s throw from its noxious canals, life on the mainland…
André Naffis-Sahely
How I Did It: Eric Gregory Award – Jenna Clake on ‘The Cow Whisperer’
Welcome to the first instalment of our Eric Gregory Award 2018 ‘How I Did It’ series. We asked the winners of this year’s awards to explain the process behind one of their award-winning poems. First up, Jenna Clake writes about ‘The Cow Whisperer’. The Eric Gregory Awards 2019 will close for entries on the…
Jenna Clake
Review: ‘Isn’t Forever’ by Amy Key
Isn’t Forever (Bloodaxe Books) is a moving and sincere song of mourning; a song which gathers impetus not through showiness but via a slow accrual of raw, untheatrical and many-layered sadnesses. In ‘Lousy with unfuckedness, I dream’, Key writes: …
Amy McCauley
Get Stuffed: Why We Need to Pay Attention to Things
Lately, Stuff has been on my mind – reading, writing, life. We’ve just moved into our first home and have installed U. A. Fanthorpe’s ‘Atlas’ in a frame on the wall. It’s a great example of how the largest themes can emerge from ‘storing the WD40 and knowing when to use it’ [sic]. I now…
Caleb Parkin
‘It feels like a time of poetry again’ – the Revolutionary Moment(s) of 1968
Obsessed, bewildered . By the shipwreck Of the singular . We have chosen the meaning Of being numerous. . (George Oppen) In Giedre Zickyte’s 2012 film How We Played The Revolution a Lithuanian politician looks back to the time when his country peacefully withdrew from the Soviet Union. ‘It was a time of poetry,’ he…
Gloria Dawson
Review: ‘Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods’ by Tishani Doshi
Evocations of dogs, rain, love letters, mouldy houses, dead girls, adolescent longing, and an understanding of the body’s mortality inform poet-dancer Tishani Doshi’s Girls Are Coming out of the Woods (Bloodaxe Books), an eerie world of both ruin and tenderness. Conferred the Eric Gregory Award for Poetry and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection…
Niroshini
Please – No More Poetry: Writing in Response to Trauma
The idea for my upcoming online course – Please – No More Poetry – began with a question that has occupied my thoughts for many years now: what is the relationship between poetry and trauma? In a conversation with my doctoral supervisor – a wise scholar and wonderful poet – I described my fascination with…
Anna Veprinska
Review: ‘Assurances’ by J.O. Morgan
Paying particular attention to the undercurrent of waiting, Assurances (Cape Poetry) navigates an assembly of perspectives and voices affected by the Cold War. Through what he’s gleaned from his father’s role in maintaining the R. A. F. Airborne Nuclear Deterrent at that time, J. O. Morgan’s work seeks to illuminate the shared space and connections…
Maryam Hessavi
Interview with the Primers Three Winners: Sarala Estruch, Romalyn Ante and Aviva Dautch
With the deadline for Primers Volume Four, our mentoring, editing and publication scheme, just around the corner, we thought we’d catch up with last year’s Primers poets, Sarala Estruch, Romalyn Ante and Aviva Dautch to find out about their experience on the programme. You can buy their book, Primers Volume Three here! First things first, how did it…
Poetry School
Against English: an interview with Harry Giles
Will Barrett: Hi Harry. Tell us about your upcoming course with the Poetry School, ‘Against English: Dialects, Distortions and New Vocabularies’. Harry Giles: Hi! ‘Against English’ grew out of a one-off session I did with the Poetry School a few years ago, exploring the overlaps between writing in regional dialects, in experimental constraints, and in sound…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Review: ‘Emerald’ by Ruth Padel
The irrepressible spirit of green guides Ruth Padel’s new collection Emerald – in terms of inner and outer growth, mysterious stone tablets and the lucent mineral itself, ‘a seam / of dazzle green’. Emerald is a tender and sustained honouring of the author’s mother Hilda, and the particularities of her dying, in 2017. ‘This is…
Sarah Westcott
Digital Poetry Beyond the Prehistoric
I think digital poetry is a genre that can offer poets exciting possibilities to create new work that explores and expands language. And that’s what I’m aiming to do with my new course at the Poetry School. Without disappearing down an internet wormhole ‘researching’ the topic of what is digital poetry, what are digital poetics…
Maya Chowdhry
The God in the Forest: Finding the Spiritual in Nature
In the Iliad, there is a passage where Zeus calls all the gods to an assembly on Mount Olympus. But it is not only the Olympians who come – along with them are all the streams, and the nymphs of the woods, the rivers and the meadows. The Homeric world is one in which nature…
Seán Hewitt
Course Quick Guide – Autumn 2018
Face-to-Face Courses London Three Term Courses: The first term of our flagship year-long courses (3 x 10 week terms) The Poet’s Toolkit (Autumn 2018) with Shazea Quraishi Explore poetry’s inner workings, hone your craft, and take a close look at various forms and techniques to help your poems achieve lift-off. Pamphlet / Portfolio…
Poetry School
Review: ‘Venus as a Bear’ by Vahni Capildeo
My favourite Capildeo moment (that I’ve come across in print) is in a TLS ‘20 questions’ interview from December of last year when in response to ‘Jacques Derrida or Judith Butler?’, the Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow in Poetry at Leeds University came back with ‘Ursula LeGuin. And David Bowie.’ What appeals to me most in…
Nasser Hussain
Review: ‘Electric Arches’ by Eve Ewing
In a recent reading, Eve Ewing quoted the Black Liberation Army leader Assata Shakur: “Black Revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions.” Ewing agreed with Shakur, but then went on to ask: what if they did drop from the moon? This is the premise of the opening poem of…
Peter Raynard
Review: ‘Soho’ by Richard Scott
By turns explicit and playful, elegiac and defiant, Richard Scott’s Soho draws on the fiercer traditions of queer poetry without ultimately depending on those who have gone before. The result is a debut not bound by allegiance to some generalised category but liberated by joy and clear execution. Soho is not necessarily inseparable from London’s…
Patrick Davidson Roberts
Archiving Your Self Yourself: an interview with James Davies
James Davies is interviewed by James Davies – his uncannily named next-door neighbour – about his upcoming course for Poetry School, Archiving Your Self Yourself: Quantified Self Studio James Davies: Hi there James. How are things this morning? James Davies: Really really great James. Right now I’m dandy. I’m usually dandy. I see the birds….
James Davies
Review: ‘The Built Environment’ by Emily Hasler
Epigraphs often function as concise statements of intent, subtly staking out the territory and interests of a collection. Emily Hasler’s The Built Environment (Liverpool University Press) begins with a quote from Nan Shepard’s The Living Mountain acknowledging the wonderful tension between what we know and what we cannot know of the natural world, which for Shepard…
John Challis