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National Poetry Day – One-Day Sale on One-Day Workshops!
To celebrate National Poetry Day today, we’re offering 20% off all our one-day workshops, for one-day only. Just use code NPD20 at the checkout stage online to receive 20% off the following courses: Working with Collage with Linda Black Experiment with collage and re-appropriation with Linda Black, learning how these processes can create exciting and original…
Poetry School
‘You’ by Amelia Loulli – Primers Shortlist 2018
You You came in the night put your hands around her cheeks and yanked her from my nipple or if You didn’t You stole all the food fed Yourself on the bread I baked that afternoon grew bigger or if not You hid in the corners stealing glances of moments You called mistakes warned would…
Amelia Loulli ‘To be fifteen’ by Victoria Richards – Primers Shortlist 2018
To be fifteen and after the third can of Super Strongbow cider, to throw up all over the embossed wallpaper belonging to that girl in the year above, the one with the bra straps and dirty jokes. She breathes in smoke without coughing, says, “alright?” to the most beautiful boy at school, the most beautiful…
Victoria Richards ‘After Adlestrop (for Helen Thomas)’ by Valerie Bence – Primers Shortlist 2018
After Adlestrop (for Helen Thomas) As usual, it is not widely known that you were there beside him in that carriage, at that station, suffused in sunlight and birdsong when someone cleared their throat as no-one left and no-one came. As usual, you are invisible — the hidden framework, an underpinning without which he would crumble,…
Valerie Bence ‘Catholic Girl Ghazal’ by Rachel Burns – Primers Shortlist 2018
Catholic Girl Ghazal Gotta love us Catholic girls, worshipping Madonna, singing Madonna mimicking her dress, the crop short sexy tops, just like Madonna. We are good Catholic girls, dare to bare our navel girls, chewing Wrigley’s gum hoops in our ears, crucifixes swinging from our necks, sexy like Madonna. Look, now we’re meeting up with…
Rachel Burns ‘Last eclipse’ by Nina Powles – Primers Shortlist 2018
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Nina Powles
Primers Volume Four Shortlist and Longlist Announced!
The Poetry School and Nine Arches Press are thrilled to announce the shortlist and longlist for Primers Volume Four, our mentoring and publication scheme. After reading thousands of poems, judges Kim Moore and Jane Commane have selected ten manuscripts for the shortlist and 17 manuscripts for the longlist. We’ll be publishing poems by all of…
Poetry School
Review: ‘Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity’ by Ella Frears
Ella Frears’ Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity is one fragmented but connected lyric essay. Where the lyric essays that are most frequently referenced (Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen) tend to work in small blocks of prose (or prose-poetry), Frears explodes the lyric essay form, producing the familiar blocks of prose,…
Jenna Clake
How I Did It – Forward First Collection: Abigail Parry on ‘The nine lives you might have lived, were it not for the nine thin spells through your heart’
Welcome to the fourth instalment of our Forward Prizes First Collection ‘How I Did It’ series. Once again, we’ve asked the poets shortlisted for this year’s Felix Dennis Prize to explain the process behind one of their award-shortlisted poems. Here, Abigail Parry discusses the history of a key poem from her collection Jinx. The Forward Prizes ceremony will…
Abigail Parry
How I Did It: Forward First Collection – Kaveh Akbar on ‘HERITAGE’ from Calling a Wolf a Wolf
Welcome to the third 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. Here, Kaveh Akbar talks about the devastating real-life event behind the poem ‘HERITAGE’. The Forward Prizes ceremony will take…
Kaveh Akbar
#28for28: Sharing Space
Poetry School is sharing space. We are sharing our blog and broadcasting writers’ stories of those who experience indefinite immigration detention in the UK and those who work with them. We are also sharing our physical space: three of the tales – by Patience Agbabi, Neel Mukherjee, and Bernardine Evaristo – were filmed here at…
Poetry School
How I Did It: Eric Gregory Award – Zohar Atkins on ‘System Baby’
Welcome to the third 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. In this piece, Zohar Atkins writes about ‘System Baby’, Heideggerian ontology, and writing poems in resistance to ‘unsayability’. The Eric Gregory…
Zohar Atkins
Review: ‘As Slow As Possible’ by Kit Fan
Kit Fan’s multifarious second collection takes its title from an art installation / piece of music for a church organ by John Cage which began its performance in September 2001 and is scheduled to end, believe it or not, in 2640. It takes on average over a year for a note in Cage’s composition to…
Richie McCaffery
Poetry in Aldeburgh Announce 2018 Line-Up
Curated by Paul Stephenson and Poetry School Full line up and tickets now available at www.poetryinaldeburgh.org Over 100 of today’s most exciting poets from across the UK will come to the Suffolk coast to celebrate all things poetry with a weekend of 45 workshops, events and performances. We take as themes climate change, queer…
Poetry School
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