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CAMPUS Debate: Poetry Books – Do Looks Matter?
Can you judge a book by its cover? There’s only one way to find out – CAMPUS debate time! For the ayes we have Annie Freud, and the noes with have Patrick Davidson Roberts. Let the literary death match begin… YES Annie Freud When I say that looks matter when it comes to poetry…
Lavinia Singer
Primers Shortlist: Geraldine Clarkson
Welcome to the first in a series of sneak peeks at the Primers candidates. The shortlist has been announced and the judges, Jane Commane from Nine Arches Press and Kathryn Maris, are busily reading the full submissions to decide which three poets will receive mentoring and publication in the inaugural Primers: Debut Poetry Shorts. We’re eager to find…
James Trevelyan (Poetry School)Modern Day Masters
No discussion of craft and design would be complete without mention of “the Master-craftsman” – William Morris. Inspiring the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th/early 20th century, his genius spread to all fields, including household fabrics, wallpapers and furniture, stained glass and tapestry, poetry, translation and novels, political activism and reform……
Lavinia SingerWriters and Narcissism
I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I mustn’t say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers. – Sylvia Plath Poetry as Self-Love Are writers narcissists? Narcissists don’t really depend on anyone apart from themselves, they have an idealised self-sufficiency, beneath that an anger and…
Janette AyachiOpen Workshop: ‘Aesthetic Experiments’
Have you ever wanted to completely experiment with design of poem? Manipulate a piece of text to make something once drab, now visually stunning and fantastical? Or give serious thought to how form might best reflect content? This Open Workshop with Lavinia Singer, the Poetry School’s Digital Poet in Residence, is all about appearances. Choosing…
Poetry SchoolVisiting the Dead
When I was 5 years old, my father left us and set up home with a wealthy, erratic, glamorous Mexican woman. His Karmic payback was that whilst he left our mother a single parent of two, he, within a decade, was a single parent of three. Hence, I have half-siblings who are glamorous and fairly…
Anna RobinsonNational World Octopus Poetry Day
Today is National Poetry Day, but did you know that today is also World Octopus Day? Coincidence? We think not. We discovered not too long ago that almost everyone who worked for the Poetry School had written, completely independently of the other, a poem about an octopus. This included our former Director, Ollie Dawson, whose…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)Happy National Poetry Day!
To celebrate, here is a sumptuous jumble of poems touching upon the themes of ‘books’, ‘bookshops’, ‘craft’, ‘design’, ‘handwriting’, ‘reading’ and ‘libraries’. Thank you to all who made recommendations, and if there are any that I’ve missed, please write them in the comments section below as I’d love to see them. Enjoy! ✎ ‘In my…
Lavinia SingerVoices in the Dark: A Memorisation Diary
This blog collects a series of diary fragments taken over a period while I was preparing to recite from memory a poetry set for this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. The event – ‘Voices in the Dark’ – sees poets performing to a crowd in a pitch black room, without the usual notebooks and print-outs to…
Janette AyachiTwenty-first Century Craft
Sing, clear-voiced Muse, of Hephaestus famed for inventions. With bright-eyed Athena he taught men glorious crafts throughout the world, – men who before used to dwell in caves in the mountains like wild beasts. But now that they have learned crafts through Hephaestus the famed worker, easily they live a peaceful life in their…
Lavinia Singer Primers Shortlist Announced!
This July, we set up a virtual in-tray and invited submissions to a new publishing and mentoring programme in association with Nine Arches Press. Our Primers scheme will find three new poets whose work we’d like to foster, publish and promote. 2,316 poems later, Judges Jane Commane and Kathryn Maris are delighted to announce the…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Oscar Wilde & Lord Alfred Douglas
You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty. – Oscar Wilde, De Profundis In 1891 Oscar Wilde met Lord Alfred Douglas in the architectural jewel-town of Rouen. Douglas was…
Janette AyachiA Bibliophile’s Manifesto
☞ Because I feel its secret weight in my pocket or the crook of an arm ☞ Because little creatures bore and live inside it, making a home for themselves ☞ Because it smells ☞ Because I can turn it over in my hands and feel how it’s been made ☞ Because it harbours memories and the trappings of…
Lavinia SingerA Personal Preface
As a child I wrote many a “happy song”, often compiling them in books of my own construction with accompanying drawings. Thankfully these weren’t such “that all may read”, but remained private, incompletely formed little objects that I enjoyed making and owning. Since then I’ve been learning about the bookmaking process and how techniques…
Lavinia SingerMeet the Digital Poet in Residence: Lavinia Singer
An Interview with Lavinia Singer
Hi Lavinia! When we first started discussing your residency – For the Love of Craft: Confessions of a Bibliophile – you spoke about wanting to “defend your aestheticist interests”. So could we start by explaining what those are and why you think they need defending? Lavinia: I suppose the issue is with beauty and how to…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)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