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‘An Armadillo Takes To The Stage At London Zoo’
I’m really not cut out for showbiz. I may look tough in my leathery armour, but inside my heart is soft as mud. I’m not flashy. I don’t have the meerkats’ swagger. Nobody gasps when an armadillo shuffles in. You’d think with all these plates of bone covering my body, I wouldn’t be so thin-skinned….
Alexandra English‘Polar Bears, Auckland Zoo, Summer 1963’
Dark mucky eyes. Muzzles pant, sniff air, mad with the scent of humans, or seals. I hold my toffee apple and dangle a red jandalled foot through bars above their pit. Bears sway in sync, contained in white, a concrete code for snow. Polar bears attack only when hungry, or provoked—I imagine blood, shreds of skin, knuckles…
Cherllisha SilvaPub Chats: Reality Street
An Interview with Reality Street
Hello there, Ken! What are you drinking? Ken: Pint of Harvey’s best. How long has Reality Street been running? Ken: Since 1993. What were some of the practical things you did to get started? Ken: I went into an informal partnership with fellow poet and publisher Wendy Mulford. We each put a few hundred pounds…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)The Line Break Ep #1 – Philip Gross: What If, What Then?
THE LINE BREAK EPISODE
Poetry SchoolCall and Response: an Interview with Rishi Dastidar
An Interview with Rishi Dastidar
As part of our festival themed Summer School this July, poet Rishi Dastidar will be running ‘Call and Response’, a workshop based around writing poetry from music. We caught up with Rishi to find out more … Hi Rishi! Tell us a bit more about your Summer School workshop, Call and Response – what do…
Poetry SchoolHow I Did It: ‘witchbundle’
Creating the premise for your poem is a tricky enough task on any given day. Besides the obvious self-critical murmurings of ‘is this worth writing about’, once you have an idea you then need to conjure your pen (or fingers) to create some magical syntax that relays your thoughts to the reader. How many hurdles…
Robert HarperMixed Borders: bedding in
A few more reports from our Mixed Borders garden poets. The different residencies are starting to take shape now, as people learn more about their gardens and the visitors who are likely to attend during the Open Gardens Squares Weekend on 13-14 June. Some gardens will have visitors numbering in the thousands, some just a…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)Open Workshop: ‘Invisible Dark Matter’
What small objects keep you awake at night, and which ones do you often lose, or have intimate relationships with? What was the last genuinely challenging idea you heard or read about? In this new Open Workshop, poet Simon Pomery will encourage you to take objects, preferably small ones with little or no poetical history,…
Poetry SchoolA run from the Pound
I’ve come to the end of my residency, which ran in tandem with my commission to write and present a documentary about Ezra Pound and economics (due out on Radio 4 this summer). It has been fantastically helpful for me, not least because I sometimes find it hard to see the wood for the trees,…
Ira LightmanCAMPUS Pamphlet: ‘Interventions’ by Ian Duhig
A new publication for your digital shelves, arising from our Lo and Behold! scheme. We are delighted that Ian Duhig, who worked on a L&B-funded project with Wordquake, Sewerby Hall and Bridlington Poetry Festival, is publishing Interventions as a CAMPUS pamphlet with us. Ian created a series of poetry interventions at Sewerby Hall in response…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)Festival Season: A Glimpse at our Summer School
Our Summer School is designed so that students can fit in one last blast of poetry writing before the holidays: for a whole week in July, we’ll be running a series of workshops, some for a full day, some for the morning or the afternoon, so that you can fit them in around your packing…
Poetry SchoolThe Line Break: our new, monthly poetry podcast
We’re quite thrilled to announce The Line Break, a new poetry podcast from The Poetry School. The Line Break is a free monthly podcast about writing poetry, hosted by Ryan Van Winkle and produced by Colin Fraser. For over 7 years Ryan and Colin have been providing high-quality podcasts for the Scottish Poetry Library and the…
Poetry SchoolKeep On: an Interview with Clare Shaw
An Interview with Clare Shaw
Starting on Thursday 11 June in Manchester, ‘Keep On’ will help poets at any level who are in need of a little fuel and maintenance to keep writing. We had a chat with tutor Clare Shaw about the upcoming course, and her thoughts on what to do when the poems aren’t coming … Hi Clare!…
Shane RounceEpiphanies and Other Movable Feasts: an Interview with Nichola Deane
An Interview with Nichola Deane
Part of our festival themed Summer School this July, Nichola Deane’s workshop Epiphanies and Other Movable Feasts will look at the ‘architecture of moments’ that make up our lives. We caught up with Nichola to find out more about what she has planned… Hi Nichola, tell us more about your workshop…what’s it all about? ND:…
Poetry SchoolNotes on Modernists III
DONALD DAVIE I first started reading Donald Davie, one of my own heroes, because of his odd critical book/assemblage of reviews Under Briggflatts. He did not inspire me to read Pound, not consciously, so much as to ask more questions of mainstream British poetry. I came to Pound later, and then dived into Davie on…
Ira LightmanThe Good Dark: an interview with Ryan Van Winkle
An Interview with Ryan Van Winkle
Ryan Van Winkle – poet, podcaster, Poetry School tutor, and an all round “good force” for the UK poetry scene – approached us a little while back with an intriguing and brilliantly novel idea: Would we like to be part of a ‘virtual book tour’ to help promote the release of Ryan’s second collection, The Good…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)Appy Economics
That was is a pound that i was at your house in 1 of the most famous cancer certainly the one most houston straight up in the problems the multinational global village of international capital were here to stay and everybody’s studies economics to understand economics is hard to visual i cannot allusion discount to…
Ira LightmanPound Won’t Change You
Do people read the Cantos and change their politics or their approach to economics? No, I don’t think so. Does the poetry bring that subject alive, if you are a poetry fan? Does it preach a message only poets can hear? No, I think, not really. But there are things in there. There are questions…
Ira Lightman‘The Empty House’
Open to the windswept world, Home of lost leaves And forgotten feathers. Faint whisperings of sound, Which may be mice, Or maybe smaller life, Or may be just the walls, Settling down to dust. Stagnant, still air, Turns the grime of years Into insipid icing, Distilling scents of solitude To assail the senses. Wood is…
Martin PallotPound and found
It’s interesting how often critics and lay people describe the Cantos as a mix of poetry and prose. Ezra Pound himself said “The problem was to get a form—something elastic enough to take the necessary material. It had to be a form that wouldn’t exclude something merely because it didn’t fit.” http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4598/the-art-of-poetry-no-5-ezra-pound But, let’s note,…
Ira Lightman‘Poetry Prosthetics or The Six Million Dollar Poet’
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804, and died in 1864. He wrote novels and short stories, most notably The Scarlet Letter, and The House of Seven Gables. Written in 1851, when Hawthorne was at the peak of his creative powers, The House of Seven Gables is a Gothic story about an awkward spinster named Hepzibah,…
Nasser HussainBe our next Digital Poet in Residence!
The Poetry School is delighted to invite proposals for its next Digital Poet Residency. Since 2013 we’ve run eight digital residencies on CAMPUS, on an invitation only basis. For our 9th digital residency, we’re opening out to applications directly from the CAMPUS community. The Digital Poet in Residence is an artist-led position and we actively…
Poetry SchoolAll the films from Ross Sutherland’s 30 Poems / 30 Videos residency
Ladies and gentleman he did it! Earlier this year we challenged Ross Sutherland, our 7th Digital Poet in Residence, to create 30 original poetry films in less than two months, and we’re now delighted to collect together the results of this epic, prolific enterprise. It’s been a fantastic project and wonderful working with Ross, who…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Lo and Behold – the latest
At the beginning of the year, we put out a call to poets and artists to surprise us with innovative poetry promoting ideas. Five of them did … and we were able to fund each of them with £750 to get their projects off the ground. Here’s how they’re getting on so far … …
Poetry SchoolWhat’s a digital residency? Why’s a digital residency?
The photograph above was taken at approximately 4pm on 4 March 2015, in the Waterloo branch of Foyles. The display stand – a promotion for Penguin’s new read-in-one-sitting Little Black Classics range, and but two days old – has been all but stripped bare. From a backlist containing Whitman, Keats, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Sappho, Coleridge,…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)