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‘The Poet as Curator, the Curator as Poet’
A curator [from the Latin curare – to take care of] selects and organizes the items in a collection or exhibition. In creating a poem, we can follow a similar process, selecting found text and juxtaposing it with new writing to spark fresh meanings and revelations. Anne Carson has been described as ‘the…
Shazea Quraishi
Notes on Modernists II
It’s obvious that analysis of other artists walks hand in hand with being an artist oneself. When you have a go at a form, then it becomes much easier to read a master’s work in that form. In an analogous way, the therapist Carl Rogers said that whenever he had an epiphany (of compassion) for…
Ira Lightman
21st Century Canto: Pound, Resounding
So, we have looked at the timbre of words. Sometimes one also explores a different metre (one based on length of syllable rather than stress, for example) in order to get at a good line in a good timbre. This is what we tend to do when we remember poets’ work: we remember a line….
Ira Lightman
Notes on Modernists
My initial pitch for this residency, and one that I’ve fancied for a while, is to set a number of exercises based on Modernist poets. These are some suggestions in brief. BASIL BUNTING Avoid synonyms. Try to use the plain word. If the same object appears several times in your poem, call it the…
Ira Lightman
Pub Chat: an interview with Enitharmon Press
An Interview with Enitharmon Press
In the latest of our series of feature-length interviews with independent publishers, set in our imaginary poetry theatre pub somewhere in Lambeth, we spoke to Stephen Stuart-Smith of Enitharmon Press…. Hello there, Stephen. What are you drinking? Stephen: Leffe. How long has Enitharmon Press been running? Stephen: Since 1967. What were some of the practical things you did to get…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
21st Century Canto: Sounding Out Pound
I began my first week by discussing Ezra Pound and translation. I very much hope that this will lead some new readers to have a go at translating, to get past worrying whether or not they can hold a long conversation in another language before at least trying to get something from a poem in…
Ira Lightman
Playing with History: an interview with Kelley Swain
An Interview with Kelley Swain
Hi Kelley! Could you tell us about your Summer School workshop, ‘Playing with History: Using the Past in Poetry’ – what can we expect? Kelley: “Playing with History” is going to be a full-day workshop, starting at 10:30 and running until 4:30 in the afternoon, with a lunch break. I’m going to start by talking…
Claudia Winter (Poetry School)
A budding ‘pomance’: an interview with Jacqueline Saphra
An Interview with Jacqueline Saphra
Jacqueline Saphra, one of The Poetry School’s new tutors, talks to us about her new course, ‘Training the Poem’ and takes us through some of her work and methods.
Claudia Winter (Poetry School)
Pub Chat: Sidekick Books
An Interview with Sidekick Books
In the latest of our series of feature-length interviews with independent publishers, set in our imaginary poetry theatre pub somewhere in Lambeth, we spoke to Kirsten Irving, one half of the team behind Sidekick Books… Hi there, Kirsten! What are you drinking? Kirsten: Lime and soda, please! How long has Sidekick Books been running? Kirsten: Since 2009. September, to be…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
21st Century Canto: Infestation-Translation
What Pound did for me is infest my poetry world. All across it, in small pockets. One reason that Pound is hard to emulate is that he has re-thought a lot of different things, and he brings all these to bear simultaneously: like all Shaun the Sheep’s friends piling into one human overcoat and walking…
Ira Lightman
21st Century Canto: Translation, Pound-style
A very good place to start with Ezra Pound is the Selected Poems and Translations edited by Richard Sieburth, originally published by New Directions, the New York publishing house founded by James Laughlin when Ezra told him “You’re never going to be any good as a poet. Why don’t you take up something useful?”. The volume is…
Ira Lightman
The blossom front: celebrating Hanami with Fawzia Kane and Louisa Hooper
On Saturday 18 April, Fawzia Kane and Louisa Hooper will be celebrating the Japanese tradition of Hanami, or ‘flower viewing’, with a blossom-fueled poetry workshop at the Brogdale Collections… Louisa: It hardly seems it, but it’s more than a quarter of a century since I sat beneath the avenue of flowering cherries by the great…
Claudia Winter (Poetry School)
‘Viciousness in the Kitchen!’ – reading Plath’s Ariel(s)
When I think of most poets, I think of individual poems. Say Auden and I think: ‘As I Walked out one Evening’, for Larkin ‘Aubade’, for Bishop ‘One Art’. I honestly couldn’t name which individual collections any of these poems were in. Say Sylvia Plath though and I, like most people, would immediately think: Ariel. It’s…
Clare Pollard
Prose Poets: ‘Of Fabulists’
One of the little squabbles I tend to have with the dictionary, is over the word Fable and its family. Although conceding that the fable has at its heart a moral, peppered through Dr Johnson’s definitions is a great suspicion of the telling. A fable is a lye and the writing of a fable is…
Helen Ivory
Announcing our MA in Writing Poetry with Newcastle University
We are delighted to announce a ground-breaking collaboration between Newcastle University and the Poetry School: a new Masters degree in Writing Poetry, leading to the award of an MA from Newcastle University*. Starting September 2015, the two year part time course will be based in two centres. You can study at the Poetry School in…
Poetry School
House and Universe: an interview with Rebecca Goss
An Interview with Rebecca Goss
Hi Rebecca, you’re teaching a new course with us this Summer, ‘House and Universe: The Poetry of Home and Domestic Objects’. Tell us a bit about the course – what can we expect? Rebecca: This course will be an opportunity to explore the spaces and objects that define ‘home’, and consider what does ‘home’ mean?…
Claudia Winter (Poetry School)
Meet the Digital Poet in Residence: Ira Lightman
An Interview with Ira Lightman
Find out more about Ira’s digital residency here, or join the 21st Century Canto group on CAMPUS to get all the latest updates. Hello Ira! Tell us about your upcoming residency, ‘21st Century Canto’ Ira: It’s a tie-in with a documentary I’m making on Ezra Pound, his crash and our crash, for Radio 4. One…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
‘Sound Poetry and Performance Technique’
One of my favourite things to do in the old days was to take my friends along to the experimental music and poetry night at The Klinker in Dalston, which at the time was in a pub that was then a bit grimy but nowadays is, predictably, very posh and full of people who wear hats and…
Emma Hammond Announcing our MA in Writing Poetry
We are delighted to announce a ground-breaking collaboration between Newcastle University and the Poetry School: a new Masters degree in Writing Poetry*. Starting September 2015, the two year part time course will be based in two centres. You can study at the Poetry School in London, or at Newcastle University itself via a combination of…
Poetry School
Our 8th Digital Poet in Residence is…
This March we’re inaugurating not one but two new residencies. Ross Sutherland was the first, and we’re very happy to reveal that Ira Lightman, poet and word-dabbler extraordinary, will be our 8th Digital Poet in Residence. Ira’s residency is called ’21st Century Canto’. He explains: “All my adult life I have been fascinated with The…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Re: Drafts – “Start lying about your age”, and other thoughts on biographical notes
As I write this, the latest edition of The Rialto is at the proofing stage and the last of the biographical notes are slipping in by the skin of their teeth. It feels a bit strange, having spent months getting to know poems, to now have a task focused on poets. In most cases the…
Holly Hopkins
Dear Diary: an interview with Laura Barnicoat
An Interview with Laura Barnicoat
The Great Diary Project is a repository for unwanted diaries of any date and kind. In the pages of the 2,000+ diaries collected for the project so far are the most remarkable details of everyday life, often overlooked in the history books. In preparation for The Poetry School’s Summer Workshop ‘Dear Diary’ at The Bishopsgate…
Claudia Winter (Poetry School)
The Anti-Poetic: an interview with Julian Stannard
An Interview with Julian Stannard
Hi Julian! Tell us more about your course, ‘The Anti-Poetic‘… Julian: Calling the workshop ‘The Anti-Poetic’ is a bit of a conceit. I want to see if we can write poems we might not normally write. These workshops explore what might be called (paradoxically) the anti-poetic, namely the writing of a poem which somehow escapes…
Claudia Winter (Poetry School)
Love, Death, Art, Time and Nature: an interview with Sarah Corbett
An Interview with Sarah Corbett
Tell us more about your new course, ‘Love, Death, Time, Art and Nature…‘. What brought you to the subject? Sarah: I was asked to do five sessions that would appeal to students at various stages in their development, so my idea was to take five ‘themes’, and to treat each session as a unit in…
Claudia Winter (Poetry School)
Meet the Digital Poet in Residence: Ross Sutherland
An Interview with Ross Sutherland
In which Ross Sutherland answers questions about his ’30 Poems / 30 Videos’ project, the distinctions between film poetry and poetry film, and what all this writing lark is about anyway. Ross Sutherland is The Poetry School’s 7th Digital Poet in Residence. You can also read about his residency here, or join the ’30…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)