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How I Did It: ‘The Survivors’
I began the poems in Disko Bay during a midwinter residency at Upernavik Museum in Greenland. My brief was to write about the history of the island and its present-day community but I hoped to record some observations on the wider Arctic environment too. However, the weather conditions were so extreme I couldn’t walk much…
Nancy Campbell
How I Did It: ‘Upstairs’
‘Upstairs’ is the pivotal poem in my collection Distance. Six years ago, illness forced my mother to live, sleep and eat in the downstairs part of the house. This was the inspiration for ‘Upstairs’. My original intention was to highlight how, in old age, we slowly lose the world we created. But to write it…
Ron Carey
The Autumn 2016 Programme – in two lines or less!
Everyone likes a bite-sized chunk, right? Well here is a barrel full of them as we try to introduce our Autumn 2016 course programe in two lines or less… Three-Term courses The Construction of the Poem with Tim Dooley, Judy Brown, Matthew Caley, Claire Crowther and Martyn Crucefix: A 30-week course on the history…
Poetry School
Open for Entries – Primers Volume 2: a Mentoring and Publication Scheme
The Poetry School and Nine Arches Press are delighted to announce the arrival of Primers Volume 2, the second year of an annual scheme which creates a unique opportunity for talented poets to find publication and receive a programme of supportive feedback, mentoring and promotion. The scheme will select three poets whose work will feature…
Poetry School
Call for Thank You Poems
The Poetry School is about to set our illustrator to work on some new print. We’re going to make thank you cards to send to partners, donors and collaborators who work with us. Our brochures are illustrated by Margaux Carpentier, and her images are always inspired by Poetry School students’ poems. Have you got, or…
Poetry School
‘Seashell Sound Recordist’
Pick up any Jack-knife Clam, Triton, a Sharks Eye or Pearwhelk. Place any Conch to your ear and you will hear my work. Have you ever heard the Sea Biscuit, the Thick Lucine or the Kitten’s Paw? Because I have travelled from sandbank to coastline and shore to shore, passed through raging squalls, over calm…
Poetry School
Primers Volume II Announcement
A bright yellow poetry book is doing the rounds, perhaps you’ve caught a flash. It’s Primers Volume 1, the fruit of a collaboration between the Poetry School and Nine Arches Press designed to identify, mentor and publish talented poets. Geraldine Clarkson, Maureen Cullen, Katie Griffiths and Lucy Ingram are the Primers Vol 1 writers, their…
Ali Lewis
‘Fragrance of roses’
They left the heat of Uganda deep into the night on Alitalia flight 204. Their parents waved, silent on the tarmac. The smell of kerosene gave way to the fragrance of roses on Raihana’s handkerchief. She and Fahima already had a grip on Britain, what with Jane Eyre, The Avengers, Robin Hood. Greeted by thrashing…
Poetry School
Poetry School / Poetry in Aldeburgh Paid Residency Opportunity!
Get your buckets and spades, bikinis and biros ready – here’s news of a paid poetry residency by the beach! The Poetry School and Poetry in Aldeburgh have a joint offer to make: an opportunity for a festival-focused poet in residence. While the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival organised by The Poetry Trust has a breather and…
Poetry School
Mixed Borders: The London Open Garden Square Weekend
The tomatoes are plumping and the lawns greening ready for this year’s London Open Garden Square Weekend. For the second year running, the Poetry School and the London Parks and Gardens Trust have planted trainee poets-in-residence amongst London allotments, churchyards and communal spaces for a weekend dedicated to opening up London’s secret gardens to curious…
Poetry School
The Bloodjet: An Interview with Katrina Naomi
An Interview with Katrina Naomi
“I think the main thing for me is if you’re going to write about violence, do it well. Let us smell it, taste it.”
Ali Lewis
‘In The Museum of Antiquated Offices: Exhibit C, fax machine’
I jerk awake some nights, jabber in tongues of space-age dolphins, a blip blip red-eye scanning lost horizons for a connecting signal. A curl of white paper blooms – like winter roses under glass – briefly warm to touch as grey smoke ghosts of secretaries pass. I crave the tap of polished fingernails the gossip…
Emma Simon
‘The Court Verbatim Shorthand Reporter’
I have wielded my pencil like a sword at 140 words per minute to record the minor mis-doings of the inhabitants of Staines, frantically squiggled dots, dashes, chays, jays, hays and yays ─ in days before a ‘hay’ or a ‘yay’ was a common greeting and Pitman 2000 sounded so futuristic at around a double-decade…
Jill Munro
‘The First Day of Galungan’
Rain, rain, endless tropical rain, day after day. Boredom blooms heavy-lidded with flaming stamens that drive me out out of the villa, in spite of the rain, in search of diversion, out down the long, winding Balinese lane that runs past Pura Petitenget to restaurants and shops. I have the world to myself, but there…
Judith Rawnsley
‘Stones’
Before he came, I lusted for those stones – my flesh should bruise and split, my bones should break to speak the pain of loss and shame, the words we couldn’t speak. He cast in dust the words, “I’m yours”; the heavy breathing crowd clutched stones as heavy as their virtue, hard as heartbreak. The…
Jen Emery
‘Dear Cape Town,’
I would like to give you a giraffe like the one in the central park of Cuidad Juárez. In that northern Mexican town they treat their giraffe like a tourist. I’d watch our giraffe amble along Buitengracht, meander through Bo Kaap and District Six. Volunteers would gently shoo her into the Groote Schuur Estate where she would…
Kerry Hammerton
Welcome to our shiny new website
A quick word from our Digital Programme Producer… So why has this all happened? Well, our existing website was coming up to its sixth birthday, which is practically ancient in digital dog years, and as good a reason as any to give the site a fresh look. More importantly, both CAMPUS and everything else the…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Poetry School Summer Term Launch Reading
We’re launching all the new Summer courses and workshops, and celebrating the work of our students and tutors at our Summer Term Launch Reading, this Friday 22nd April. At this free event at the Tea House Theatre, Vauxhall, we’ll have two Summer Term tutors reading: Catherine Smith and R.A. Villanueva, plus we’ll hear the work of…
Ali Lewis
Announcing our Digital Open Day 2016
Impressive announcement klaxon! Yes, that’s right – don your party capes and matching booties as we’re having another Digital Open Day this 5 May 2016. In the next couple of weeks we will be throwing off our winter clothes and unveiling our new look web platform, bringing together our two existing sites – thepoetryschool.com and…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
How to Collaborate with Yourself
One of my favourite comics is Robot Hugs’ Identity Shift. It’s addressed to folk exploring gender and sexuality, reassuring them about the anxieties that come when identity shifts and changes over time, but it makes a broader and stranger point: that all of us present ourselves as different people in different places. The face we…
Harry Josephine Giles
Making Birds: an Interview with R.A. Villanueva
An Interview with R.A. Villanueva
R.A. Villanueva is an award-winning Filipino-American poet and founding editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art. His first collection, Reliquaria, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and new writing appears in Poetry, Prac Crit and widely elsewhere. Now living in the UK, Ron’ll be teaching the Summer Term course Making Birds: New Poetic…
Ali Lewis
Open Workshop: ‘Storms in Teacups’
Entropy is the inclination of all matter to tend towards disorder. The fact that we are able to lead lives with any semblance of structure or routine is a miracle. Yet even within the most controlled and well-practiced everyday acts, there is a propensity towards chaos, a possibility of total loss of control. In this…
Poetry School Our Summer School Programme 2016
Summer’s here and the time is right for getting a burst of varied and exciting poetic inspiration. Once again, this Summer we’ll be running a week of workshops during the day to get you warmed up and inspired for some patio, beach or park-based reading and writing. We’ve asked some of our favourite poets to…
Ali Lewis
The Line Break #10 – Paula Meehan: People Make The Songs
THE LINE BREAK
Poetry School
Open Workshop: ‘Reduce/Reuse/Recycle’
According to T.S. Eliot, mature poets steal where immature poets borrow. Stealing, here, doesn’t mean copying: rather, it means turning what you take from another writer ‘into something better, or at least something different’. It’s an appealing idea, but does it work? In this Open Workshop with Adam Crothers, we will think about how to…
Poetry School