Manifestos
Instructions for Throwing your Voice
1. Learn to speak without moving your lips. Hold a finger over your mouth as if trying to tell someone to be quiet. This will help prevent your lips from moving. Gritting your teeth together may help. 2. Change your voice. A convincing “vent” voice must be very different from yours. Choose your “vent” voice carefully…
Clare ShawA Bibliophile’s Manifesto
☞ Because I feel its secret weight in my pocket or the crook of an arm ☞ Because little creatures bore and live inside it, making a home for themselves ☞ Because it smells ☞ Because I can turn it over in my hands and feel how it’s been made ☞ Because it harbours memories and the trappings of…
Lavinia Singer
GOLDEN RATIONALITY
I’ve been asked to write a manifesto. This doesn’t suit the person I now am, but I did write one 20 years ago (it was published in an anthology of manifestos, Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh, Manifestos and Unmanifestos, edited by Rupert Loydell) and I have never really explained or qualified it. So perhaps I…
Ira Lightman
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
#poetwisdom
1. When writing a cover letter to a magazine, don’t compare yourself to Shakespeare. 2. At a poetry workshop, don’t say ‘It’s too late to change this poem, I’ve already sent it to the Queen’. 3. Don’t introduce yourself at a poetry residential course by saying ‘my name is Elspeth/Ivy/Agnes but you can call me…
Kim Moore‘The New Violence’
So this comes from a place of love. The world has brought us to a place where to be sincere is to look foolish. Self-image has become so tangled with creation that the end result suffers and serves only to reinforce the unnerving feeling that nothing is really real anymore. Anyone who creates in this way…
Emma HammondThis Twittering World
‘This Twittering World; or 8 Things I Don’t Necessarily Disagree with About Poetry On The Internet’ Internet as 3D Poet The Internet provides the readership of a Poet with a rounded representation of his or her life and work. Social media, which typically the Poet is fond of, allows the Poet’s Shakespearean ‘aside’ to…
Alex MacDonald
Special thanks to James Revill for making sure the whole Trip went ahead!
Mardy bum nah then bloomin’ ‘eck. What’s that when it’s at ooam. Eeh ah’ll gi’ thi summat to rooer abaht ah’ll gi’ thee a thick ear. Eeh ee by gum what’s that when it’s at ooam gi’ o’er face like a slapped arse. Eeh appens as maybe. That’s champion ah’ll box thi ears ah’ll box…
Shane Rounce
The Weird Transformists
The weird transformists apply the New Weird to poetry but are not restricted to sci-fi topics. The weird transformists do not see the poem as a fixed object but one that can be manipulated in a multiplicity of ways. The weird transformists know each poem has a different way of telling the time, which might…
Claire Trevien