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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
‘Thought, in poetry, is felt’
Alright, sometimes a poem can be too conceptual, too austerely cerebral, too loftily academic, too preeningly intellectual, too all-round thinky. Sure. But only as much as other poems can be too runnily sentimental, too intellectually lazy and biddable. Surely some kind of middle ground is in order, then? I believe that this middle ground should…
Joey Connolly
The Summer 2017 Programme — in two lines or less!
One-Term Short Courses: Stand-alone courses comprising five two-hour sessions over ten weeks in one of our London classrooms. The Pamphleteers with Saradha Soobrayen: Write, select, arrange and edit poems for your pamphlet with Saradha Soobrayen. #Afterhours with Inua Ellams: Discuss, dissect and explore various ways into writing counter or companion pieces to poems from the canon….
Poetry School
Review: ‘The Toll’ by Luke Wright
Luke Wright is at his forceful best in this state-of-the-nation adventure that is far darker than its jaunty rhythms and bell-like rhymes might suggest. The first poem of The Toll (Penned in the Margins), which serves as a kind of epigraph, carries the refrain ‘Oh England, heal my hackneyed heart’, and is one of the…
Jacqueline Saphra
Re: Review: ‘You Have A Visitor’ by William Wootten
William Wootten’s You Have a Visitor (Worple) shows an impressive mastery of a range of forms working in the tradition of Auden and Gunn. Sequenced around the seasons, You Have a Visitor begins with ‘Reveille’ in which ‘Day comes up cold,’ and works through ‘Easter Tide’, ‘Of Late June’ and the harvests of autumn, to a charming…
Jonathan Edwards
Review: ‘The Watermark’ by Alice Anderson
I think of myself as pretty much unshockable, but there are, for me, some gasp-worthy moments in this unflinching collection from Alice Anderson. Set in the American South, The Watermark is an apparently confessional book and almost every element of Anderson’s world is refracted through a lens of sex and violence. This is the story…
Jacqueline Saphra
CAMPUS Pamphlet: ‘all that’s ever happened’
Make room on your digital bookshelves for the latest in our series of flicky PDF pamphlets, a series in which we celebrate the talents of the students taking place in our courses and projects. The New North Poets are a group of talented new writers who have come to the Poetry School via New Writing…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)
Poetry and Visual Art: Gallery Day Schedule – 18th February
This is the finalised schedule for the gallery day of Tamar Yoseloff’s Poetry and Visual Art two-day course. You can find more details of the course here. 10:30am: Gagosian, 6-24 Britannia Street (off Grays Inn Road) London WC1X 9JD King’s Cross / St Pancras Tube / Rail – Euston Road exit (10 mins) Richard…
Poetry School
Review: ‘Psalmody’ by Maria Apichella
Maria Apichella’s first collection, Psalmody (Eyewear), ends on a note of quiet, confident affirmation: I can’t play the sax I can’t bang the drum I can’t work the flute I can’t pick the harp but I can respond. Apichella’s tough, lyrical psalm-poems celebrate the virtue of responsiveness, suggesting the possibility of a deeper,…
Jeremy Wikeley
Poetry School 1215.today Paid Digital Residency – Open for Applications!
1215.today, in collaboration with The Poetry School, want to identify a poet for a six-week digital residency with the 1215.today site to begin at the end of April, through May 2017. The chosen poet will receive £1,000. 1215.today commemorates 800 years of the Magna Carta in an online platform that gives young people a space…
Poetry School
Review: ‘Speak from Here to There’ by Kwame Dawes & John Kinsella
‘We co-exist.’ Speak from Here to There (Peepal Tree Press) begins with this claim, followed by a description: The York gum bark is stripping itself off, shiny skin underneath exposed to the sun. Late summer – summers that won’t end – and it seems to be a statement, much more than restating a habit, a well-researched…
Will Harris
Review: ‘The Number Poems’ by Matthew Welton
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight. John Berger, Ways of Seeing The Book of Numbers is like an artist’s sketch…
Heidi Williamson
‘Trixie Might: No More Baristas’
There are millions of baristas in rumbo countries who would love to hobble in fluidness. Sure, the best baristas love countries – BUT where there is typhotoxin / the right way to help is not. Rumbo + typhotoxin = hobble – help. Not millions… MILLIONS! The nippy and squealing effect of high steam is close…
Shauna Robertson
Review: ‘Moon For Sale’ by Richard Price
Moon for Sale does not pander to, or patronise, its reader and often reading the poems you become aware you are in the presence of a mind working much more quickly and sharply than your own. If, like me, vast swathes of your reading diet consists of fairly orthodox lyrical poetry, then it might serve…
Richie McCaffery
Battle of the Somme Poetry Residency Performance
A few months ago we invited applications for a collaboration opportunity with Simon Barraclough to commemorate the Battle of the Somme. The ten poets selected have been busy writing poems and will perform them at a special event in London on Saturday 4 February. This is our contribution to the UK-wide cultural commemorations of the…
Poetry School
‘Witness’
I am trying to hear the cow’s story, but it is thin and acrid as the stream of piss and fear from the back of a cattle truck pitching between hedges on the abattoir road. I am trying to hear the cow’s story, but all I have seen with my own eyes is the cluster…
Caroline Harris
‘The Cutter’
Anyone bold enough can find the booth in Ho Ping Lane, twin shutters opened out like wings heart strung with keys and locks of every kind, tinkling promises in the sultry wind. Deep inside the master cutter squats, squints as he selects a blank to suit your purpose. He spins his wheel, its sharp teeth…
Judith Rawnsley
The Long Read: Reflections on a Poetry in Aldeburgh Residency
In Autumn 2016 we advertised for applications for Poet in Residence at the inaugural Poetry in Aldeburgh Festival. Ben Rogers was subsequently put into position and undertook a month full of research, interviews, writing prompts and poems. We asked him to provide his reflections on this mammoth task in the hope it might prove useful to…
BenRogers
‘Briony Grist: Let’s be clear about the challenges we face with ermits.’
First and foremost, we should be concerned about ermits obtaining cilicious books – underperforming mystics must improve or they will merit cryogenic sealing – no one benefits from hirsute heresies. Look, until such day as they can safely be released into runnels, their otherness and thick fur folios must be cauterised, curried, and caked in…
Richard Stillman
Melting identities: does it matter where you are from?
There is no doubt about it: the world is changing, and changing quickly. As people travel from one place to another to work or live, they create increasingly multicultural communities where different ideas, customs and languages interact, combine and clash. In London, for example, the streets are filled with the cadences of different dialects as people…
Jennifer Wong
‘To the wild boar swimming in Victoria Harbour’
My call to you the outlaw who got your way to play in our water, in front of so many eyes, without paying taxes or having sweated your butt off for a job, The rogue who tusked down rules of traffic, burst through fences, skirted CCTV and mobile snapshots just to cool the bites of…
Florence Ng