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How I Did It: ‘Sow’
Like many of the poems in Black Country, it took a long time for ‘Sow’ to travel from its first notes to its final form. It began as a scribbled note in my diary in May 2010. I was walking along Highgate Tube platform in a new pair of black boots and, hearing them trip-trapping,…
Liz Berry
Re-writing the Map
Maps, like poems, can mean different things to different people. If I were to draw a map of my neighbourhood I might include completely different things to my neighbours, or the lady in the flat upstairs. I would be sure to include the homes of the friendlier local cats, the house with the boarded-up windows,…
Suzannah Evans
Queer Poetics for Non-Queers (or On Exclusivity in Identity Politics)
Queer Poetics II In my last post about queer poetics, I said, “In celebrating queer poets, I don’t think that straight poets should feel that I’m not talking to them”—but I’m not sure that I did a sufficient job of explaining what the value of “minority” poetics might be. Indeed, a wise reader called me…
Jason Schneiderman
Open Workshop: ‘Crimes and Misdemeanours’
Think of all the rules you’ve heard in poetry workshops: Show don’t tell. Be more concise. Restrain your use of adverbs and adjectives. On this Open Workshop with Kathryn Maris, you’ll be ripping up the workshop rulebook with a roguish disregard for good taste and ‘respectable’ writing. With the help of a step-by-step assignment devised by…
Poetry School
‘Object Waiting’
COMMENT Natasha Flaw (aka Natalie Shaw) features in Ink, Sweat & Tears, Antiphon, Butcher’s Dog and Prole, amongst others. She can also be found at http://natalieshawpoems.wordpress.com. ‘Object Waiting’ was written in response to Richard Osmond’s Open Workshop ‘Written in Juice of Lemon’, where students were challenged to write a poem designed to be published, broadcast…
Natalie Shaw
Open Workshop: ‘Mosaics from the Broken Mirror – Writing and Revising the Ghazal’
The ghazal makes unique rhetorical demands on the Western writer. In our latest Open Workshop, Jason Schneiderman will be getting you to think through your ghazals and to explore the multiple ways to revise these modular poems. Do you enjoy finding a hand-crafted wooden puzzle in your Christmas stocking more than a satsuma? Prefer origami…
Poetry School
Poetry & Multimedia I
A recent trend in UK poetry is what I might call ‘multimedia projects’ or ‘live literature,’ a development that interests me for several reasons. Like many poets, I have a love-hate relationship with poetry readings. As an audience member, I find that some readings can feel electric or even transcendent. But others can be dull,…
Kathryn Maris
Queer Poetics I
Poetry has always been the province of the consummate insider and the total outsider—a dichotomous split between the institutionalized John Clare types and the silver spoon James Merrill’s. The origin myth of poetry in English is of a literal outsider. Poor Caedmon is so embarrassed to have no songs to sing that he goes out…
Jason Schneiderman
‘Dream On: Waking Up Your Poems with the Phantasmagoric’
So with one bound, Jack was free … and he woke up to find it had all been a dream. But when do you wake from the book of the dream, shrug it off with a cold shower, a shot of black coffee? There can be no forgetting; even after the fire the archives…
Ben Wilkinson
‘No laughs please, we’re poets – can comic poetry be good poetry?’
I can vividly remember the first time I read a poem in public. It was at a writing workshop at the University of Warwick, full of earnest young women and men who sat around in the cafeteria between lectures dressed in black, discussing the work of the Modernists and stroking their beautiful chins. We’d been…
Jonathan Edwards
Poetic Attention II: In Praise of Snapshots
When I was in Best American Poetry 2005, there were a number of complaints in the blogosphere about how very New York-centric the issue was. The concern—probably a justified concern—was that the New York poetry scene is too insular and self-congratulatory. Interestingly, the guest editor was Paul Muldoon. An Irishman who teaches at Princeton (New…
Jason Schneiderman
How I Did It: ‘Burnt Rose’
I wrote ‘Burnt Rose’ in Newsham Park in Liverpool, on a nature-spotting walk with my son. Sometimes we take our notebooks to the park, along with a football and some snacks, and write down — or draw pictures of — what we see. That day we found, under a tree, a rose that had been burned: it was…
Chris McCabe
Poetic Attention I
In Tom Stoppard’s play Indian Ink, the heroine Flora Crewe arrives in the Indian city of Jummapur in the 1930s to give a lecture on literary life in London. Flora Crewe is a poet, and when she arrives at the British club, one of the older members extols the virtues of Kipling, and quotes a…
Jason Schneiderman
Bob
In defence of the sestina: part 4 Here is an incorrect story I tell. My story is that Jonah Winter’s ‘Sestina: Bob’ appeared alongside my poem ‘Ophthalmology at Dawn’ in an issue of Ploughshares. ‘Sestina: Bob’ was literally across the page from my poem, I tell people. It was literally sneering at my poem, exposing…
Kathryn Maris
Live Q&A with Mark Doty: ‘Queer Poetics’
This 5 December 2014, one of the mega-giants of American poetry, Mark Doty, will be live on CAMPUS and in conversation with Digital Poet in Residence, Jason Schneiderman. Mark Doty was the first American poet to win the British T.S. Eliot Prize. One of the most important authors to write about HIV/AIDS in America, Doty’s vision…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Poetry Matters
You can’t hurt poetry. You can write bad poems, but that will not hurt poetry. You can like bad poems and you can dislike good poems, and you will still not hurt poetry. You can even write bad reviews of good books and good reviews of bad books, but even then, you will not have…
Jason Schneiderman
On Manifestos, Arrogance and Judgment
Manifestos are arrogant. But so is any scribble to paper or canvas because art is an act of arrogance. When God created the world it was an act of arrogance. The creation of a creation myth that ascribed creation to God was an act of arrogance. Arrogance is an ugly trait. Silence, however, can signal…
Kathryn Maris
Spring 2015 courses (in one line or less)
LONDON – SHORT COURSES Poetry of Place with Roisin Tierney – where do you come from, where are you going to? Writing tasks and workshopping based on a broad definition of ‘place’ Routes into Poetry with Tamar Yoseloff – the best course for beginners, starts in the Spring and continues till the Summer Defining a…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Unreal Ghazals in English
When Agha Shahid Ali subtitled his anthology of formal ghazals, “Real Ghazals in English” he was trying to point out that the constraints of rhyme and refrain were what made a ghazal real. But what of unreal ghazals? Even Shahid admitted, “I do like many aspects of the so-called ghazals” that his American comrades were…
Jason Schneiderman
Live Q&A with Don Share – ‘Poetry Here & There’
We are overjoyed to announce that Don Share, poet and editor of Poetry magazine, is coming to CAMPUS this December for a Live Q&A. No wacky catchy byline needed – it’s Don Share, everyone. Don Share! Don will be in discussion with Kathryn Maris, our Digital Poet in Residence, and they’ll be variously discussing: the…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
I know what I know, says the almanac
In defence of the sestina: part 3 ‘Sestina’, a widely anthologised poem, is one of two sestinas Elizabeth Bishop published. (The other is ‘A Miracle for Breakfast’.) I first came across ‘Sestina’ in the third edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, the doorstopper required for a creative writing class with WN Herbert in 1987….
Kathryn Maris
Just Add Ghazal
Introducing the ghazal, part 2 Because the ghazal is modular, it can be especially fun to write and revise. In most poetic forms, revision can feel incredibly frustrating—you change one line, and suddenly, everything else is off balance. I once had a student send me a poem, and I told him that I loved the…
Jason Schneiderman
Hockey, hockey
In defence of the sestina, part 2 Once in a while, for no reason at all, these lines go through my head: Call me Zamboni. Nights my job is hockey. I make the ice and watch the kids take slapshots At each other. They act like Esposito. They are the first three lines of a…
Kathryn Maris
Lo and Behold! The Poetry School Micro-Commission Fund
Lo and Behold! The Poetry School Micro-Commission Fund The Poetry School invites applications to its fund to support innovative poetry creation and promotion projects. We have five sums of £750 to support poets, artists and producers in the creation of ambitious new work. We want to fund projects that explore new ways of creating or…
Poetry School
What’s a Ghazal?
Introducing the ghazal, part 1 The ghazal is the oldest poetic form still in use. The word ‘ghazal’ is pronounced “guzzle” in some languages and “gu-ZAHL” in others, though in both with a guttural “g” almost like the “ch” in “Bach.” Supposedly, the name comes from the sound a wounded gazelle makes as it dies….
Jason Schneiderman