Essays
Prose Poets: ‘Of Gears’
I like poems that change gears, or change gear, if you prefer. I also like songs that change gear, like ‘I Heard Ramona Sing’ by Frank Black, which gives the gearbox a good work out before settling into the first verse. It seems to rev through four or five intros before finding its optimal…
Simon Barraclough
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
Prose Poets: ‘Of La!’
Over there! Cries the thief, pointing away from himself and the victim as he picks a pocket. While the attention is focused on one thing at a distance, some switch is made about the victim’s person. Only later, in a moment of condensing awareness does the victim feel the change. Something about them is…
Nichola Deane
Prose Poets: ‘Of Abstraction’
It’s one of the great, gratifying surprises to discover that Dr Johnson was an Objectivist. Epochs ahead of his time, he extols in his 1755 dictionary the virtues of paying attention to the world itself – the world of objects – in a manner that would surely have met with approval from William Carlos…
Dai George
Prosodies in the US & the UK: A TransAtlantic Coda
When Kathryn and I started our residency, the one topic we were sure we would discuss was the difference between the poetry scenes in the US and the UK. Of course, that never happened—it’s like how the song you buy the album for becomes the song you start skipping first (well, before iTunes). So here…
Jason Schneiderman
Just One Poem
When I first started writing all I wanted to do was to have one poem published. Just one, I told myself, and then I would be happy. I didn’t think beyond this because I didn’t really believe it would happen. It was the poet Jennifer Copley who told me about poetry magazines and persauded me…
Kim Moore
Taking a poem for a walk
To celebrate the release of Walking London – our new audio walking tour download – we asked tutor and urban wanderer, Tamar Yoseloff to write about why walking inspires her and how the best ideas always happen on foot. In her brilliant book, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit says: Walking, ideally, is a…
Tamar YoseloffKeep Yes and No Unsplit: the rise of Internet translation
Last year, I was delighted to be asked by SJ Fowler to be part of his Camaradefest (a continuation of his series of events where two poets collaborate on a project) with Jack Underwood, Faber Poet and lecturer on Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College. We merged recent ideas which we were both interested in. Then,…
Alex MacDonald
How I Did It: ‘The Shipwrecked House II’
I wrote ‘The Shipwrecked House II’ at my grandmother’s funeral. I know this because this image is my contribution to her funeral book. A few weeks later I met Tom Chivers for the first time to discuss my yet untitled collection. I wanted to go with ‘Hook’ in memory of my grandmother (her maiden name)…
Claire Trevien