Courses
Where It Begins: an interview with Nii Ayikwei Parkes
An Interview with Nii Ayikwei Parkes
Where does a poem begin? How does a poem not exist and then suddenly, miraculously flare into life? This Summer, poet, novelist and editor Nii Ayikwei Parkes will be unpacking what it means to think like a poet. In his new online course, Where It Begins – a course for new poets, Nii will be…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
New Definitions and Neologisms: the Poetry of Dictionaries
Retiring to the canopy of the bedroom, turning on the bedside light, taking the big dictionary to bed, clutching the unabridged bulk, heavy with the weight of all the meanings between these covers, smoothing the thin sheets, thick with accented syllables—all are exercises in the conscious regimen of dreamers, who toss words on their tongues…
Kate Potts
YOU, The Movie – Horror, Western, Romance, Noir and Disaster Poetry
How many films have you watched? Ten? A hundred? I imagine the figure is likely to be in the thousands. All those Sunday afternoon matinees, those trips to the cinema, the Shakespeare remakes shown in class, the teatime classics, the 10pm premieres, and the hours spent on Netflix binges certainly add up. I bet you…
John Challis
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
‘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
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)The Poem Noir
Watched any of these TV shows lately – The Killing, The Bridge, Luther, or Breaking Bad? Or any of the following films – The Dark Knight, Black Swan, or Drive? If you have, then chances are you’ve already come across a version of film noir. Films noir, at their most cliché, are films about ordinary…
John Challis
Performance Skills for Poets
How do you stop your knees knocking and your paper wobbling when you perform your poetry? How can you make sure they can hear you in the cheap seats? We’ve got a workshop coming up at the Poetry School with poet and performer Nick Field that will help you settle those questions. Nick writes: ‘I’m really…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)
Samuel Beckett & Poetry
It was not enough to drag her into the world, now she must play the piano. —from ‘Embers’ I remember the first times I encountered Beowulf, Auden, Hughes, Plath, and many others, but I can’t remember the first time I came across Beckett’s work. Was it on the page, in the theatre, on the radio,…
Simon Barraclough
Verse Stories: interview with Catherine Smith
An Interview with Catherine Smith
Hi Catherine. You’re teaching a course this Autumn 2014 called ‘Verse Stories’. Tell us more about it. Catherine: I’ve always been drawn to narrative in my own poems – I wrote short fiction first, poetry afterwards, so it seemed a natural progression – and whilst I enjoy and admire all sorts of poetry, I feel most…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
A Name To Conjure With: Reading ‘Mercian Hymns’
When I first started reading poetry as a teenager, poets seemed to come in three flavours. There were urbane cynics living in the fast lane or sulking in the suburbs. There were the everyday poets who were fond of anecdotes and who wandered into kitchens, started listing things and then tried to force an epiphany…
Holly Hopkins
The Fabric of Cringe … and how to avoid it.
We’re a big fan of Judy Brown’s poetry – here she is reading from her Forward shortlisted Seren collection Loudness – so we are very pleased we’ve been able to tempt her to teach for us this Autumn. Jusy is interested in getting to the nub of how to successfully incorporate details of our modern lives –…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)
Animal Magick
It is perhaps not surprising that The Faber Book of Beasts, edited by Paul Muldoon, has been consistently in the top 50 of Amazon UK’s best-selling poetry titles since its publication in 1998. The earliest cave drawings depict humans alongside animals. Creatures have provided the imagination with the essential content for mythologies and allegories; they…
A.B. Jackson
Transreading Central Europe
When I mention I translate contemporary Polish poetry, I’m often asked: ‘Do you translate Szymborska?’ ‘I might, but I don’t,’ I explain, ‘there’re so many other poets who deserve equal attention.’ By now Szymborska, Różewicz, Herbert, Miłosz and Zagajewski have become household names also in English; they’re fortunate to have some poems in more than…
Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese
The Poetry of Parenthood
The images coming from Gaza at the moment show mutilated and dying children. It would be tempting to say that as a parent you feel the horror more, but this is smug nonsense: people without children are just as capable of compassion. What a parent feels is, instead, perhaps more complicated – my compassion is…
Clare Pollard
Scotland small? A Century of Scottish Poetry
Buried in one of Hugh MacDiarmid’s long, later poems (‘Direadh’) is a clear passage that strikes the reader like an angry epiphany: Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small? Only as a patch of hillside may be a cliché corner To a fool who cries ‘Nothing but heather!’ (…) MacDiarmid then moves…
Richie McCaffery
Poetry of public and social engagement
A trawl of the poetry-publishing magazines and presses confirms that there is a lot of well-written, intelligent and sensitive poetry around today. However, much of it is pretty samey — first-person lyric poetry stimulated by occasion, experience and impression. The poet encounters something more or less out of the blue — a landscape, a ‘feeling’,…
Steve ElyEvery Page A Stage
[Movie trailer voice-over style announcement, very deep and gravel throated]: Coming Soon from The Poetry School – Every Page A Stage – starring Jane Draycott! With lots of sessions over two weeks and a real concentration of attention on a topic, we’re delighted to welcome Jane Draycott back to the Poetry School with her Every…
Poetry SchoolNew Homers – a Reading & Writing Course
I’ve had a vivid and unscholarly interest in the Homeric stories since I was a boy. In those days both the battles of the Iliad and Odysseus’s wanderings among monsters and goddesses filled me with a simple, childish sense of wonder. In my early twenties I discovered Patrocleia, the first section of Christopher Logue’s Homer…
Edmund Prestwich
The Plot Inside The Poem
The playwright David Mamet famously said that what we want to know more than anything else is ‘what happens next’. My own obsession with narrative goes back to my writerly roots in theatre and later in film; I’m always looking for the story, even when it isn’t obvious. I’ve been making a study of the…
Jacqueline Saphra
Write more poems this Summer at the Poetry School
It’s just over a week to go before our Summer Term starts. We’ve dozens of new courses and workshops – both face to face and online – to help you wrangle your poems into shape. You can download the whole programme here – or browse the highlights below. Not taken one of our classes before?…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)
Summer courses on CAMPUS
Dear CAMPUS poets – our swimming shorts are on and our 12 tog duvets have been stuffed back in the attic. Summer is arriving. The Poetry School’s summer term starts 5 May 2014 and we’ve got lots of new, excellent online courses packed full of powerful poetry prompts and fool-proof exercises to get you all…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)Reading Dylan Thomas
The first time was a reading Fern Hill aloud, pacing the room the while, hoping (though not meaning to) that some of the pastoral Dylan stardust of having been so ‘honoured among wagons’ that he was ‘prince of the apple towns’ might rub off on a Londoner. The second time was a glimpse, from the…
Graham Fawcett
Reading the South Americans
My father, early on, lit the touch-paper of South America for me by trying to make short work of my disappointment that Colonel P H Fawcett, who wrote Exploration Fawcett and then disappeared in the Mato Grosso in 1925 while looking for El Dorado, was not a direct relation. I even ended up glad he…
Graham Fawcett