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Tales of the Globe: Interview with Karen Whiteson
Your upcoming course for us is called Tales of the Globe, could you tell us a little bit about it? It is a 5 week course which will be stretched to bursting point in an attempt to contain its material. The main intention is to map some of the connections and differences between that body…
Ali Lewis
#Afterhours: An Interview with Inua Ellams
An Interview with Inua Ellams
‘I think, arguably, all poems are response poems and attempts by the poet to find or claim personal space in any given topic.’
Ali Lewis
Review: ‘Long Pass’ by Joey Connolly
W.H. Auden said he would always ask two questions of new writing: firstly, “how does it work?” and secondly – “what kind of a guy [or woman or non-cis person] inhabits this poem?” These are questions which cut to the heart of what Joey Connolly does (and does so well) in his first collection, being…
Will Harris
Review: ‘Complicity’ by Tom Sastry
This promising pamphlet showcases a fresh and original voice exploring the self as proud outsider challenged by family, relationships and the world but refusing to compromise. The poet’s biography tells us ‘he thinks that not belonging is more interesting than belonging’ and this is certainly borne out in the poems. It’s a daring feat indeed…
Jacqueline Saphra
Review: ‘Beginning With Your Last Breath’ by Roy McFarlane
There’s a quality about Roy McFarlane’s Beginning With Your Last Breath (Nine Arches Press) that makes me want to step away from academic language when describing it, and instead focus on the thoughts and feelings that come to mind. That is not to say that there is little here to talk about – McFarlane’s command…
Bridget Minamore
NaPoWriMo 2017
April is National Poetry Writing Month and in celebration we have devised a project to get you writing every day. We will be supplying a fresh writing prompt, and an example poem to get you in the right frame of mind, every morning over the whole of April. All you have to do is join the…
Poetry School
How I Did It – Ted Hughes Award: Salena Godden on ‘LIVEwire’
In the fifth instalment of our Ted Hughes Award ‘How I Did It’ series, Salena Godden explains the creative process behind ‘Can’t Be Bovvered’‘ from her shortlisted work LIVEwire. ‘LIVEwire‘ marks Salena Godden’s first album in nearly a decade, and is a compilation of live and studio recordings, archives and brand new work. It features live material from…
Salena Godden
Review: ‘Santiago’ by Cheryl Follon
Prose poems have been in season for a while now, but Cheryl Follon’s Santiago (Bloodaxe) has the potential to sweep away fatigue. The collection, Follon’s third, is entirely made up of brief prose pieces; the results are engaging and, frequently, very funny. Prose poetry is not without its pitfalls. For the writer, the risk of falling…
Jeremy Wikeley
How I Did It – Ted Hughes Award: Caroline Smith on The Immigration Handbook
In the fourth instalment of our Ted Hughes Award ‘How I Did It’ series, Caroline Smith explains the creative process behind ‘The Scarlet Lizard’ from her shortlisted work The Immigration Handbook. Caroline Smith’s The Immigration Handbook is the fruit of her career as an Immigration Caseworker for one of the most diverse inner-city areas in London. Immigrants’ dramatic emotions,…
Caroline Smith
How I Did It – Ted Hughes Award: Jay Bernard on ‘The Red and Yellow Nothing’
In the next instalment of our Ted Hughes Award ‘How I Did It’ series, Jay Bernard explains the many inspirations behind their shortlisted pamphlet, The Red and Yellow Nothing, published by Ink, Sweat & Tears Press. The Red and Yellow Nothing is written as a prequel to the Arthurian tale of Sir Morien – a young knight described as…
Jay Bernard
Review: ‘Incarnation’ by Clare Pollard
In this, her fifth collection, Clare Pollard engages with how we navigate our ethical way through the modern world, with its treacherous wonders. The poems in Incarnation (Bloodaxe) explore contemporary crises and question whether it is possible to transmit understanding and compassion effectively to others, particularly the young. Incarnations – of self-hood, motherhood, and ‘other’…
Heidi Williamson
‘The Zoo of the New: Writing Childhood and Family’
Would you be a child again? For all its wonder, innocence, joy and freedom, childhood can also be full of insecurity, confusion and darkness. After all, it is a land of extremes where every feeling, no matter how transitory, is worn on the face. Children cannot help expressing their authentic selves, regardless of the situation….
Victoria Kennefick
Actor and spectator: poetry, film, and the paradox of viewing
The history of film could almost be divided into two obsessions: one with narrative and storytelling, the other with experimentation. My upcoming online course, Frame, Shot, Scene, Sequence: Powering Poetry Through Film, will explore how both modes can offer a vast array of opportunities to poets. Since the emergence of film in the late 19th…
John Challis
How I Did It – Ted Hughes Award: Will Eaves on ‘The Inevitable Gift Shop’
In the second instalment of our Ted Hughes Award ‘How I Did It’ series, Will Eaves explains the creative process behind ‘The Lord Is Listenin’ To Ya, Hallelujah’ from his shortlisted work The Inevitable Gift Shop. A memoir by other means, The Inevitable Gift Shop lassoes consciousness, memory, desire, literature, illness, flora and fauna, problems with tortoises…
Will Eaves
How I Did It – Ted Hughes Award: Harry Man on ‘Finders Keepers’
In this first instalment of our Ted Hughes Award ‘How I Did It’ series, Harry Man explains the creative process behind his shortlisted work, Finders Keepers, created in collaboration with illustrator Sophie Gainsley. Finders Keepers is a collaboration between poet Harry Man and artist and illustrator Sophie Gainsley that examines Britain’s vanishing wildlife. Poems from the project…
Harry Man
20% Off PBS Membership For Poetry School Students
We’re delighted to announce a new partnership with the Poetry Book Society, offering all students who book a Summer 2017 course with The Poetry School 20% off all categories of PBS membership: charter, associate and full. Set up by T S Eliot and friends in 1953 ‘to propagate the art of poetry’, the Poetry Book…
Ali Lewis
‘This is not the island I was expecting’
I learned to swim, but never mastered breathing underwater. Pebbles, the twirly insides of worn-down shells, bubbles of lugworms I could squidge and pat. Anything the sea brought me, that I didn’t have to dive for, I was grateful. Now the sea brings other things to my attention: a tide of children; puddles of stickiness…
Nichola May
Review – ‘Landlocked: New and Selected Poems from Zimbabwe’ by John Eppel
Many of the poems in Landlocked (smith|doorstop) act like an individual’s ‘truth and reconciliation’ commission applied to Zimbabwean people, politics and a natural landscape playing the reluctant stage to violence and bloodshed. The poet’s job in Landlocked is the bring up the bodies to the surface. Landlocked is my first encounter with the poems of the…
Richie McCaffery
‘Number 90’
The skip’s hungry mouth swallowed my childhood. I fed it my record player, mattress, black and white TV, teddy bear that had soaked up girlish tears. As we left, all the years ran up the stairs, gathered in the empty rooms to wring their hands. Silence evicted music and voices, reclaimed the unfaded spaces where…
Karen Dennison
Announcing the Mixed Borders 2017 Poets
StAnza’s been and gone, the Ted Hughes Award announcements are on their way — but there’s a gap in the Spring poetry calendar that The Poetry School is still to fill. It’s time for this year’s Mixed Borders. Mixed Borders is a regular collaboration between the Poetry School and the London Parks and Gardens Trust. We…
Poetry School
Review: ‘Dora Incites the Sea-Scribbler to Lament’ by Geraldine Clarkson
Dora Incites the Sea-Scribbler to Lament (smith|doorstop) is a vigorous yes, confidently-voiced – at times puzzling, at times transporting – appealingly original. To read it is to enter a world made strange and lush with linguistic variety, audacity and delight. The cover image – of underwater seaweed which I begin to suspect is looking at me…
Anna Kisby
‘I sing the praises of a fart’: On Keeping Our Wits
More than ever, we need to keep our wits about us. If our shared reality seems increasingly topsy turvy, our need for wit – as a way of seriously and playfully experimenting with language and digesting diverse experiences – must be at its greatest. It’s a subject we’ll be exploring closely on my upcoming online course, Keeping…
Will Harris
‘Funeral Cortege As Umbilical Cord’
You have been a receptacle for the dead for as long as anyone can remember but when a vein of cars issues from the church- yard on the mainland across the strand at low tide I consider you more womb than tomb, your graveyard a belly-button tethered to the funeral cortege, your coastline foetal,…
Majella Kelly
Review: ‘Serious Justice’ by Jen Calleja
Jen Calleja’s Serious Justice (Test Centre) is a haunting book, documenting the anxiety and isolation of everyday life through elegant, disarmingly intimate poems. Many of the poems in Serious Justice masquerade as casual observation about a wide variety of ordinary characters living their ordinary lives. At close up, these experiences are often revealed to be…
Sophie Robinson
‘A Quiet Passion’ Instagram Poetry Competition
The Poetry School and Soda Pictures are delighted to announce a new poetry competition to mark the release of A Quiet Passion – a new biopic of Emily Dickinson (in cinemas 7 April). The story of 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson is brought to vivid life in this sensitive biopic by director Terence Davies,…
Poetry School