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‘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)Janette Ayachi is our new Digital Poet in Residence
After a close-fought competition, and my it was hard sifting down to a single winner, deliberations are over and we’re delighted to announce that Janette Ayachi will be our next Digital Poet in Residence. Janette is an Edinburgh-based poet who enticed us early with her idea for a residency, ‘The Poet’s Ego: Writers Who Love…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)‘A Poet’s Field Guide: Close Reading & Writing’
You’re out in the field, walking, and you see something move out of the corner of your eye. What is it? A poem? Are you sure? Can you narrow it down, what sort? How does it, well, fly? Okay, perhaps the metaphor is a little strained, but identifying a bird and knowing how to approach…
Dan EltringhamThe Poetry of Wolf Hall: an Interview with Ellen Cranitch
An Interview with Ellen Cranitch
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 10 years (not the strangest thing a poet has ever done) you’ll be aware of Wolf Hall, the literary phenomenon by Hilary Mantel, which was recently adapted into one of the most critically acclaimed TV serials in British television history. As we eagerly wait for…
Shane RounceThe New Concrete: an online reading course in attentive poetics
One of the narratives of visual poetry since the 1950s is that the form has become one that can be taken up by any poet at some stage of their writing life. The concrete movement had such a strong impact that it’s impossible not to write poetry and to consider, at some point, how these…
Chris McCabe‘The Poetry Postbox’
When I feel stuck, exhausted, fog-brained, knotted up, or like I’ll never write another poem again, I sit down and write a letter. Not as an exercise— a real letter to someone, that will be posted. I write the letter by hand, and often look around to see if I can find anything to make…
Miriam NashMondo: The Global Avant Garde
I’ve run three courses for the Poetry School so far, all of which have been about avant-garde poetry. Covering specific movements in European, British and World avant-garde writing, I’ve been able to communicate things I’m passionate about to successively erudite and enthusiastic course participants. Here’s what’s coming up for the Autumn Term… Mondo: The Global…
sjfowlerPoetry and Comics
Poetry and Comics don’t need each other to communicate, and yet Poetry Comics have been around for a while. The New York School Poets, Joe Brainard in particular, created comics which used poetic text, and the idea seems to have grown from there. In the eighties an American writer and educator called Dave Morice published…
Chrissy Williams
Saturday Sessions: an Interview with Ros Barber
An Interview with Ros Barber
We caught up with poet and novelist Ros Barber ahead of her next term of Saturday Sessions: a monthly workshop course of feedback, discussion and writing for poets… Hi Ros! Your new book, Devotion, has just been published – could you tell us more about that? It’s a novel, following up on the success of my…
Poetry SchoolDevouring and Creation: the Poetry of Food and that which Feeds our Poetry
In both his letters and his poetry, John Keats implored artists to “live unpoetically” by focusing on an “acuteness of vision”. This means listening, watching, touching and tasting what is going on around us every day. We do not isolate special occasions in order to squeeze out a poem, we are moved by something that…
rosie shepperdFinding a little STEAM space…
And another ‘Lo and Behold!’ project comes to fruition – this one’s a flicky book CAMPUS pamphlet recording the poetic conversations and collaborations between Caleb Parkin and his associates. Riled by Education Secretary Nicky Morgan’s commentary on the place of the arts in education, his group of artists and scientists started asking themselves – using…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)