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Stanzas for Ukraine – 25
The Heat by Fedir Mlynchenko, translated from the Ukrainian by Stephen Komarnyckyj My flight from the war, launched by Moscow against Ukraine, is similar to the stories of millions of other forced exiles. It’s still too painful to even think about and especially to share my recollections.Despite having traversed thousands of kilometres, I still couldn’t…
Fedir Mlynchenko
Jane Clarke – How I Did It ‘Pit Ponies of Glendasan’
Welcome to our Forward Prizes 2023 ‘How I Did It’ series. This year we asked the poets shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection to write about the inspiration behind some of their poems from the chosen collection. Here’s Jane Clarke on what inspired her to write A Change in the Air. On a…
Jane Clarke
Kit Fan – How I Did It ‘2047: A Hong Kong Space Odyssey’
Welcome to our Forward Prizes 2023 ‘How I Did It’ series. This year we asked the poets shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection to write about the inspiration behind some of their poems from the chosen collection. Here’s Kit on what inspired him to write The Ink Cloud Reader. My Hong Kong childhood…
Kit Fan
How I Did It: Forward Prizes – Elisabeth Sennitt Clough on ‘My Name is Abilene’
Welcome to our Forward Prizes 2023 ‘How I Did It’ series. This year we asked the poets shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection to write about the inspiration behind some of their poems from the chosen collection. Here’s Elisabeth Sennitt Clough on what inspired her to write My Name is Abilene. My Name…
Elisabeth Sennitt Clough Stanzas for Ukraine – 24
Dreams by Dmytro Lazutkin, translated from the Ukrainian by Stephen Komarnyckyj My four-year-old daughter asked me one day “Dad, how is it that we dream?” Wasn’t she too young to be interested in concepts like this? I thought. The answer surely was no. But was I ready for such challenges as answering this question? Of…
Dmytro Lazutkin
Autumn 2023 – Quick Course Guide
Our Autumn Term is now live and we’ve got a whole host of brilliant tutors and courses lined up, so be sure to book promptly to avoid disappointment. Below is our handy Quick Course Guide, where you’ll find everything you’ll need to know. Online Courses INTERACTIVE Our classic 10-week online courses with Live Chats. The…
Poetry School A Story That Will Never End; An Obituary, for Victoria Amelina
The Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina died at the weekend from injuries she sustained following a Russian missile attack on the pizzeria where she was dining on 27 June 2023. Her death, which was announced on 3 July 2023, brings the total number of casualties from the strike to 13, including four children. Victoria, who was…
Victoria Amelina
Review Roundup – Inspector Inspector by Jee Leong Koh, Faust by Sandeep Parmar, O by Zeina Hashem Beck
Departing significantly from his earlier collection Steep Tea, Jee Leong Koh’s latest work, Inspector Inspector, is an elegiac, yet witty and bold exploration of history, exile and Asian queer identities. Through various forms and narrative, the reader is invited into a variety of spaces: the personal or the intimate, queer spaces of the lover; the…
Jennifer Wong
That’s where you get your man badge at: Poetry and Fatherhood.
Yogi (Christopher Powell) to Marcus (William Jackson Harper): You can’t just try. You have to just do it. You gotta mould this kid. It’s gonna look like you. It needs to act like you…. Plus, the whole fatherhood shit, that’s where you get your man badge at. This is where you earn it, bro. What…
Luke Palmer
MA in Writing Poetry
Are you determined to take your poetry to the next level?Apply now for the MA in Writing Poetry The MA in Writing Poetry is an accredited degree with Newcastle University and the Poetry School, delivered as part-time course over two years. The course is taught in-person at Somerset House, Strand, London by established poets through workshopping, masterclasses and 1-2-1 tutorials. To see some of the fantastic…
Tessa Foley Stanzas for Ukraine – 22
From the Springs of the Earth by Vasyl Makhno, translated from the Ukrainian by Stephen Komarnyckyj I belong to the ranks of those who witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union with their own eyes, and the Revolution on Granite and Ukraine’s Declaration of Independence. However, by contrast I observed the Orange Revolution and The…
Vasyl Makhno
Form Laboratory
Here are some exceptional poems from Jacqueline Saphra’s Form Laboratory. When I proposed this set of collaborative workshops to The Poetry School, I had no idea of the creativity it would unleash. During the darkening evenings of Autumn 2022, Thursdays became a poetic laboratory where an adventurous, generous, and inspired group of poets invented new…
Jacqueline Saphra
Writing My Sister
My sister died suddenly on 5 April. This blog was going to be about the ways I get myself writing. The analogies I find helpful. Tech, for example: harder to reboot, better to keep it going all the time, in any way you can. Remind yourself you are writing a lot of the time. Remind…
Elizabeth Parker
THE GRACE COOK MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP 2023
Applications are now open for this fully funded scholarship to the Poetry School’s MA in Writing Poetry 2023 Who is Grace Cook? Grace was my beloved wife of 22 years. On 17th June 2022, she passed away suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 59. A person of immense kindness and deep intelligence, she was…
Tessa Foley Stanzas for Ukraine – 21
Hatred by Halyna Huliieva, translated from the Ukrainian by Stephen Komarnyckyj The subjects and themes of my writing didn’t fundamentally change after 24 February 2022. The war as far as I and many other Ukrainians were concerned didn’t begin last year (and ultimately probably not nine years ago) because I studied history and somehow always…
Наlyna Huliieva
Review – Heritage Aesthetics by Anthony Anaxagorou
Our New Damage What are the contours of heritage when it ruptures through colonialism and diaspora? This dense, multifaceted question is the organising principle of Anthony Anaxagorou’s new collection of poetry, Heritage Aesthetics – primarily concerned with the underexamined intersections of British-Cypriot identity, colonial history, and masculinity. Geography and cartography yield structural anxieties: littoral Cypriot…
Tom Branfoot
Review – From From by Monica Youn
Atom by Atom… From From, Monica Youn’s fourth book of poems, is a striking departure from her first three books. Instead of addressing race obliquely and occasionally, From From confronts it full-on, from beginning to end. Interviewed in Bomb magazine, Youn explained, ‘I always felt I had permission to talk about race, but I wanted…
Jee Long Koh Stanzas for Ukraine – 20
Me, Ulyana and Energy by Iryna Sazhynska, translated from the Ukrainian by Stephen Komarnyckyj The day before yesterday, when there was a storm, my father said: ‘Do you hear that? It’s missiles again!’ It was just thunder, which we are doomed to associate for the remainder of our lives with the expectation of death. Last…
Iryna Sazhynska Stanzas for Ukraine – 19
The Poetry of Displacement by Darya Zorina, translated from the Ukrainian by Stephen Komarnyckyj Forced displacement is a theme which has not been picked up by Ukrainian poetry. This is the literary genre, however, which is usually the swiftest and most sensitive to respond to all that happens in the country and to every mass…
Darya Zorina
More love poems? Really?
‘Love’ must be one of the most overused words in the English language. So much ‘love poetry’ has been written over the course of human experience, that it might be reasonable to ask – why bother adding to the literature of love poetry? Is there anything more to say? I think there’s lots more to…
Catherine Smith Stanzas for Ukraine – 18
To Speak by Oksana Osmolovska, translated from the Ukrainian by Stephen Komarnyckyj I am ashamed to admit it but I was ‘above politics’ and even proud of it for a long time. I was of course for the Maidan and a little later I was against the annexation of Crimea and Donetsk along with Luhansk….
Oksana Osmolovska
Fortnightly Feedback with Leah Umansky
It’s always a good idea to get another set of eyes on something. Sometimes, we need new ways to look at the world. The ordinary is often extraordinary; the extraordinary is sometimes ordinary. This is nothing new. The same is true for the world of a poem and a poem is really just its own…
Leah Umansky
Review – Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhyna Mort
Music for the Dead and Resurrected, which won the International Griffin Prize for Poetry in 2021, is Mort’s third collection. The poems rove and hover over an icy, war-ravaged, politically-damaged Minsk (or ‘the hero-city of Minsk’ as the speaker in ‘Self-Portrait with the Palace of the Republic’ was forced to refer to it as in…
Oluwaseun S. Olayiwola Stanzas for Ukraine – 17, Anniversary Blog
“Anniversary Blog: Speaking To The Moment” by Stephen Komarnyckyj On 24 February 2022 Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, was struck by missiles and Russian troops, who had occupied part of the country’s Donbas region and Crimea in 2014, crossing the border. Russian state TV had been flooded with genocidal rhetoric for weeks, with threats to…
Steve Komarnyckyj Notes Hidden Under a Cherry Tree, An Obituary
Volodymyr Vakulenko – (1972-2022) The Ukrainian author Volodymyr Vakulenko was such an exuberant personality that it’s hard for his readers to believe that he is dead. The photographs, with his distinctive forelock swept to one side, and despite his fifty years, an aura of perpetual youthfulness, make it seem as if he is still sitting…
Steve Komarnyckyj