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CAMPUS Pamphlets: ‘Mixed Borders’
This giant marrow of a flicky book is the latest in our series of CAMPUS pamphlets, and has sprung from the green fingers of our Mixed Borders poets. In early summer this year, we collaborated with the London Parks and Gardens Trust to put sixteen poets in sixteen of the gardens taking part in London…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)
Literature is intoxicating, poetry in particular
Writing is an addiction; the process leaks endorphins and writer’s block can cause terrible withdrawal symptoms. When writers date writers it is like dating your dealer, you are always in close proximity to your next fix. Communication becomes transportation, we go on ‘a trip’ lining up words for inhalation: the climaxes and comedowns, mania and…
Janette AyachiRebellious Love: Allen Ginsberg & Peter Orlovsky
When Allen Ginsberg first laid admiring eyes on Peter Orlovsky in 1954 in a flat in San Francisco, he was naked in a painting with tousled yellow hair and a beguiling gaze. He asked the artist who it was posing, and Orlovsky was called from the other room, transmogrified into reality, fully clothed. It was…
Janette AyachiLavinia Singer is our 10th Digital Poet in Residence
This weekend, to coincide with the Free Verse poetry book fair, we will be welcoming another new Digital Poet in Residence to CAMPUS. Sneaky aren’t we? We’re exceptionally delighted to have the delightfully exceptional Lavinia Singer join us as The Poetry School’s 10th official poet in residence. As Janette Ayachi (DPIR
Poetry SchoolLove and Suicide: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes
The most notorious, politicized and doomed literary couple in history. Sylvia Plath was charmed into hunting out Ted Hughes after reading his poem ‘Hawk in The Rain’, and in 1956 she met his powerful and imposing presence at a party in Cambridge, ‘kiss me, and you will see how important I am’ she wrote in…
Janette AyachiRe-writing Dante
T S Eliot’s genius for quotation gave me my first taste of Dante: the marvellous epigraph to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and a line at the end of ‘The Waste Land’ – “Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina” (“then he hid himself in the fire that refines them”). Torn out of…
Edmund PrestwichWinning Ways to Make the Shortlist: an Interview with Saradha Soobrayen
An Interview with Saradha Soobrayen
With the change in seasons comes the next wave of competitions, prizes, awards and schemes for poets in the UK. Already thinking about your submissions? Poet, mentor and facilitator Saradha Soobrayen is on hand to help, with her course Winning Ways to Make the Shortlist providing 30 editing tools and writing strategies to help you get…
Poetry SchoolTrue Love: Anais Nin & Henry Miller
“Life and literature combined, love the dynamo, you with your chameleon’s soul giving me a thousand loves, being anchored always in no matter what storm, home wherever we are. In the mornings, continuing where we left off. Resurrection after resurrection. You asserting yourself, getting the rich varied life you desire; and the more you…
Janette AyachiJealous Love: Natalie Barney & Renée Vivien
These wild women were Symbolist poets in literary Paris at the turn of the 20th century, culturally advantaged and intellectually determined. They were Women of The Left Bank who set up boutiques: publishing houses and artistic salons across the city forging a Sapphic Utopia with their grandiose gestures of a luxury-bohemian, women-centred lifestyle, a place…
Janette AyachiQuiet Love: Virginia Woolf & Vita Sackville West
From this week I’m going to be briefly sketching some of my favourite writer romances of the last couple of centuries, starting with today’s coupling: Virginia Woolf & Vita Sackville West. These two female authors living in the heart of Edwardian England became lovers in 1925 when they met over dinner. Sackville-West wrote after the meeting…
Janette Ayachi‘Creatrix: Women’s Poetries for the 21st Century’
In the Honours year of my undergrad degree in English Literature, I signed up for a module called Modern Poetry. When the student gaggle – twelve or so of us – arrived for the first seminar, our tutor announced that he wanted to talk to us about the “politics” of the course content before we…
Claire AskewTangled Up In Green: Literary Lovers and Their Temperaments
“Jealousy is a useless emotion” Kirsten Norrie MacGillivray, poet and musician But is it? Has jealousy not inspired great tortured literature, a cult of memorable love songs, riotous movements and aesthetic masterpieces? Is it not as useful as a knife – a weapon that has cut through crimes of passion bleeding through the sheets…
Janette Ayachi
Love Letters as Poetry
‘That I love you, and that when I awake in the morning I use my intelligence to discover more ways of appreciating you.’ Anais Nin to Henry Miller, A Literate Passion: 1952-1963. Love is the greatest of all emotions, a passion more meaningful than any other, and the most valuable human experience in our lifetimes….
Janette AyachiSounds and Sweet Airs
Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises… I’m writing this in the back room of our house, overlooking a meeting of gardens. We’re underneath a flight path, and this morning the planes are roaring in, low, carrying the summer visitors and returners to London. In between, a robin’s ticking of alarm reaches me,…
Meryl PughRoutes Poets Publish
This beautiful object is a pamphlet created by students from last year’s Routes into Poetry course, Tamar Yoseloff’s regular nuts and bolts craft class for beginners. The pamphlet contains work by Ruth Steadman, Jonathan Hart, Tom Clark, Jess Murrain, Clare Whittle, Leonardo Boix, Stef Bottinelli, Barbara Dillon, Anjila Sinha, Paul Lee-Maynard, Analia Padin and Jenni…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)Open Workshop: ‘Exquisite Corpse’
Have you ever wanted to collaborate with a group of poets on one piece of work? Well, the Surrealists started the Exquisite Corpse enterprise for this very purpose, as a sort of party game or parlour trick, a kinetic placement of ideas and images. So let’s create our monster: no rules, no theme, no demands, except…
Poetry SchoolCosmos and discovery: an interview with Claire Trévien
An Interview with Claire Trévien
Ah the astronomer’s lot. Now cool again thanks to Brian Cox, but in principle only really fathomable if you have a degree in astrophysics, a finer understanding of stellar mass spectrums, and a very expensive telescope. To an easily confused outsider (which is exactly what I am) it used to be the wonder expressed at things…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)The raw material of language: an interview with Victoria Bean
An Interview with Victoria Bean
Victoria Bean is a visual poet and the co-tutor of our upcoming Online Reading Group, ‘The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century’. Victoria has been working over the last 3 years with Chris McCabe (another Poetry School tutor) to put together a major anthology of new approaches, ideas and techniques being used in visual…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
The Line Break #4 – Hilary Menos: Carrying Language
THE LINE BREAK EPISODE
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
A line about orange: thoughts on poets and painters
I have always been interested in the relationship between art and poetry. For many years now, I have been using art as a way of stimulating my poetic practice, sometimes by channeling the dead – such as Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly – but also by collaborating with living artists – such as Linda Karshan,…
Tamar Yoseloff
Writers Who Love Writers
A friend of mine once pointed out that as poets we are indefinitely not like everyone else. Perhaps others don’t stick their heads into things as we do, they don’t get caught up in their emotions – and suddenly in the middle of a busy bar feeling something close to what Stendhal felt in Florence…
Janette Ayachi‘Playing Your Guitar’
Because my stairwell still creaks with your step and your door snaps shut and your cold must swells the air that trips my every breath. Because I wallow in the contradictions of grief, where you stood, you stand, where you cannot be. Because heaven gives hell a shell loss cracks in absolutions or conceits, I…
Sophia GalifianakisMeet the Digital Poet in Residence: Janette Ayachi
An Interview with Janette Ayachi
Hi Janette! And welcome to CAMPUS. Tell us more about your upcoming residency – ‘The Poet’s Ego: Writers Who Love Writers’ – and what you’ve got planned. Janette: I have been rolling around in that question myself, its seems the more research I do, the more I spiral off on horizontal tangents of the self!…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)Primers: an interview with this year’s judge, Kathryn Maris
An Interview with Kathryn Maris
As the deadline for our Primers scheme edges ever closer (1st September – apply now!) we spoke to this year’s judge Kathryn Maris about what she’s going to be looking for in a submission, the predictability of poetry prizes, and savaging one’s own work. The perfect way to get the inside track on this unique…
Poetry SchoolMaster Your Manuscript
A special offer, a special offer! This poetry manuscript wrangling course is open to everyone, but for the under 30s, it’s half price. That’s because we know it’s Gregory submission time coming up, and we’d like to help out. Here are the course details … Winning Ways to Make the Shortlist Tutor: Saradha Soobrayen Day…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)