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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
We’re Hiring an Office Administrator – Join the Team!
Office Administrator We’re looking for an administrator with responsibility for the development of systems supporting course programme delivery. This a fixed-term, full-time post providing administrative support to the Poetry School’s core course programme, with additional responsibility for assessing and developing the systems supporting the delivery of the School’s programme, including its web-based databases. In the…
Poetry School
Review: ‘Who Is Mary Sue?’ by Sophie Collins
I admit, I experienced intense feelings of estrangement and disruptedness during my first reading of Who Is Mary Sue? (Faber). A kind of physical, alienating panic took hold and I struggled with a sense of being constantly dislodged from my usual reading habits and processes. The allusive, allegorical mode is realised through a very quiet approach…
Amy McCauley
Summer School 2018
Get your towels ready, it’s about to go down! Our Summer School is back, and this year is better than ever. So dust off that bathing suit and dive into a week of half-day workshops running 23 – 27 July. This time around we’ve collaborated with Rachel Long, poet and founder of Octavia – Poetry…
Andrew Parkes (Poetry School)
Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry Open for Entries!
The Poetry School are delighted to announce the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry. The Ginkgo Prize, formerly known as the Resurgence Prize, is a major international award for poems embracing ecological themes. The judges are poet and Poetry School co-founder Mimi Khalvati and another judge soon to be announced. The first prize is £5,000, second prize…
Poetry School
Review: ‘Pamper Me To Hell & Back’ by Hera Lindsay Bird
The review of Hera Lindsay Bird’s pamphlet Pamper Me To Hell & Back that I’d really like to write, my ideal review, would be a long list of the poems’ flaws and failings, a whole bunch of intellectual and even occasionally personal criticism, and then at the end there’d be a very large, badly lit…
Joey Connolly
Review: ‘A Perfect Mirror’ by Sarah Corbett
Exploring themes of location and dislocation, Sarah Corbett’s A Perfect Mirror (Liverpool University Press) finds connections in unlikely spaces, refracting global concerns through local attachments. This short collection finds its genius loci in the landscapes of West Yorkshire and the English Lake District, but its thematic concerns are much broader: seeking to create resonances with both…
Jake Morris-Campbell
Review: ‘City of Bones: A Testament’ by Kwame Dawes
I read City of Bones (Northwestern University Press), over 200 pages of poems, in one sitting. I was completely held by this heart-full incantation, this uncompromising, philosophical and allusive series of narrative, lyrical and elegiac poems that ventriloquise the ‘multitudes of souls urgently and forcefully singing, shouting, groaning, and dreaming about the African diasporic present and future.’…
Kay Syrad
Review: ‘An Ocean of Static’ by J.R. Carpenter
In between the billows of foaming brine, tucked away behind stacks of salt, lurks the pearl of a poetic endeavour completely unlike any other. An Ocean of Static (Penned in the Margins) is the debut collection by digital writer J.R. Carpenter, whose cryptic stream of ever-shifting code spectacularly reinvents the seascape. From the late 15th century…
Jade Cuttle
Primers: Volume Four Mentoring and Publication Scheme Open for Entries
The Poetry School and Nine Arches Press are excited to announce that Primers Volume Four is now open for entries. Primers is an annual mentoring and publication scheme organised by the Poetry School and Nine Arches Press. It provides a unique opportunity for talented poets to find publication and receive a programme of supportive feedback,…
Poetry School
’17 Forensic Ways I Know You’
D18S51, There is no-one like you. There is a 1 in a quintillion chance of there being someone like you, but still not you. I would know, with every sense I would know D21S11, I could pick the bouquet of your sweaty t-shirt from a line-up of sweaty t-shirts D3S1358, Who else would naturally select…
Ginny Saunders
What is a Metic Poet?
The question most writers ask me at the beginning of a Metics workshop is ‘What is a Metic?’. The simple answer usually is: You are! A fish does not know it’s a fish until it leaves the water. The term ‘Metic’ means a foreigner whose allegiances are split between their homeland and their new country. Metic is a Greek word, which we might…
Nick Makoha