Courses
Taking the Piss Flower: on the pitfalls of writing poems inspired by art, and bringing something new to the party
Ekphrasis is one of those poemy words poets assume everyone knows, like villanelle, and pantoum; but my Mac doesn’t recognise it, flags it up, and takes me to Wiki – ‘an ekphrastic poem is a poem inspired or stimulated by a work of art’. I remember feeling so happy when I first discovered the word,…
Claire Collison
The Zen of Ecopoetics: the contribution of Zen to modernist American poetry
In Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi suggests that poetry is the excess of semiotic exchange that goes beyond the limits of language and, by extension, transcends the limits of reality as we know it. In this sense, poetry offers us a way of rethinking our relationship with non-human beings and environments,…
Enaiê Mairê Azambuja
Transreading Ethiopia with Chris Beckett
Selam hullu…..Hello everyone! I’ve already blogged about my boyhood in Addis Ababa as an intro for my autumn 2021 course on Childhood: A Source of Praise. So I don’t want to repeat too much of what I said then, but it feels like I’m travelling the same path again! It’s a really great feeling, because…
Chris Beckett
Summer 2022 – Quick Course Guide
Our Summer Term is now live and we’ve got a whole host of brilliant tutors and courses lined up, so be sure to book promptly to avoid disappointment. Below is our handy Quick Guide, where you’ll find everything you’ll need to know about our upcoming courses. Online INTERACTIVE COURSES:Our classic ten-week online courses with Live…
Poetry School
Spring 2022 – Quick Course Guide
Our Spring Term is now live and we’ve got a whole host of brilliant tutors and courses lined up, so be sure to book promptly to avoid disappointment. Below is our handy Quick Guide, where you’ll find everything you’ll need to know about our upcoming courses. Online INTERACTIVE COURSES:Our classic ten-week online courses with Live…
Poetry School
‘Tension, Tenderness and Truth: Reading Elaine Feinstein
We asked our tutor Adam Feinstein some questions about his course ‘Tension, Tenderness & Truth: Reading Elaine Feinstein’. This course will be a series of lessons exploring the work of renowned poet Elaine Feinstein. Adam is a poet, critic, and Elaine’s son – who better to illuminate her work? What could a student take away from this…
Adam Feinstein
At Home in Hauntology
– Here in the garden, I notice change flickering and looping in the invisible lapse of time between my footsteps, bird feet, the silent beats of butterfly wings and the movements of flora. In my passing, I de-head the odd flower, I note a small bud in apprehension and the imminent rain. Mid summer vacillating between now and the ‘not yet.’ I hear the garden in its tumescent silence and sound. Time feels ‘out of joint’ here, as Derrida…
Agnieszka Studzinska
What we talk about when we talk about class / class is a slippery thing
Often, the problem of class is a hob ring, you won’t dare to put your hand on it. But it’s there all the same, in the food that we eat, in the air that we breathe, or just around the street corner where we live. Whenever I find myself trapped in a conversation so fraught…
Jennifer Wong
Childhood: A Source of Praise
I want to take you, very briefly, on a journey I made back in May 2007, to Addis Ababa where I had not been since I was a boy, some 40 years before. I had a photo of my friend Abebe in my pocket, standing with his family in our garden. My first stop was…
Chris Beckett
Autumn 2021 – Quick Course Guide
Our Autumn Term is now live and we’ve got a whole host of brilliant tutors and courses lined up, so be sure to book promptly to avoid disappointment. Below is our handy Quick Guide, where you’ll find everything you’ll need to know about our upcoming courses. Face-to-Face 3-TERM COURSESOur flagship weekly workshop groups where you’ll…
Poetry School
Announcing the Poetry School MA in Writing Poetry Scholarship
We’re delighted to announce the Poetry School MA in Writing Poetry Scholarship for an underrepresented poet. Poetry School is offering a full fees scholarship award (£8,100) to the Poetry School / Newcastle University MA in Writing Poetry for an outstanding applicant who is currently underrepresented in the poetry world. By underrepresented poets, we mean talented creatives who face…
Poetry School
The Fish in the Percolator – on Twin Peaks and Poetry
Twin Peaks may not have introduced me to the concept of mystery, but it did reinforce in me the value of mystery without easy resolution, and the power of the imagination. I’ve been thinking about how that echoes through poetry, and what we can learn from it. I watched Twin Peaks unfold for the first…
Chrissy Williams
Summer School 2021
We are delighted to welcome you to our 2021 Summer School! This programme of half-day workshops has been curated in collaboration with the exhibition A Fine Day for Seeing at Southwark Park Galleries. This show takes its title from the New York School poet Frank O’Hara, who bridged the literary and artistic worlds in the…
Poetry School
Looking at Lichens
Crusty, bearded, lobed – lichens thrive amongst us on pavements, graves and trees and are easily overlooked. Peer closely, run your fingers over a frilled edge or delicate antler – each lichen vibrantly itself in a human-centred world. Kathleen Jamie has talked of serious noticing – the idea of attention as a form of resistance….
Sarah Westcott
Ars Poetica: Cold Showers & Restless Sheets
Poetry is replete with pithy, aphoristic metaphors about what poems do. William Carlos Williams claimed a poem is ‘a machine made of words’, which Don Paterson modulated into ‘[a] poem is a little machine for remembering itself’ by way of Michael Donaghy’s poem ‘Machines’. I’ve long been interested in the desire to reduce poetry to…
Sam Buchan-Watts
Soundscapes
In the beginning, poems were songs. Sonnets were little songs. A villanelle was a dance. Does the meaning of poetry still depend, not just on the sense of words, but on their sounds? In his essay The Music of Poetry (1942), T. S. Eliot writes: We can be deeply stirred by hearing the recitation of…
Becky Varley-Winter
Lyric Poetry & Poetic Lyrics
To Dig What We All Say I have a small, gold book which I bought on eBay a few years ago. It’s called Richard Goldstein’s The Poetry of Rock and it was published in 1969. It declares itself to be ‘the most comprehensive collection of great Rock lyrics ever assembled.’ A review on the inside…
Lily Blacksell
Poetry that Travels
One of my favorite things to remember are trains. Somewhere in India, top bunk, spying on my fellow passengers from above: the Chaiwala with his tiers of silver tea pots, an Assamese gamer who’d gotten on three days before me, an older couple tucking their shoes between their suitcases. Like a quick inhale, I feel…
Rebecca Levi
Caledonia Dreamin’: Exploring Scotland’s Poetry
On the cut-glass if of the day,this chancer then, already in deep,headfirst among the holly leaves – Fiona Wilson, from “A Magpie, by chance” in A Clearance (2015) The feathered creatures have a talismanic presence across the work of the contemporary Scottish poet Fiona Wilson. Birds are marvels in themselves in her poetry but there…
Richard Price
Poetry and Syntax: An Emergency Toothpick in an Imaginary Landscape
There is the anecdote of the painter Edgar Degas, observing to Mallarmé that, ‘yours is a hellish craft. I can’t manage to say what I want, and yet I’m full of ideas.’ To which Mallarmé allegedly, allegedly, replied, ‘My dear Degas, one does not make poetry with ideas, but with words.’ Poems are not ideas….
Astrid Alben
A Crimson Bush Amidst Silence: Transreading Ukrainian Poetry
Going stir crazy during the pandemic? Why not take a poetic tour to Ukraine and be inspired by some of Europe’s greatest and least known writers? Some of the greatest English poetry has been inspired by other poetic traditions. T.S. Eliot powerfully imported French symbolism into English and the English sonneteers were influenced by Petrarch….
Steve Komarnyckyj
Summer 2021 – Quick Course Guide
It may be cold outside, but we have our eyes set on warm and sunny Summer! Our Summer 2021 Term is now live and we’ve got a whole host of brilliant tutors and courses lined up, so be sure to book promptly to avoid disappointment. Below is our handy Quick Course Guide, where you’ll find…
Poetry School
Spring 2021 – Quick Course Guide
As you wrap yourself in your warmest scarf and woolliest sweater, you can look forward to our Spring 2021 Term here at the Poetry School! Our Spring Term is now live and we’ve got a whole host of brilliant tutors and courses lined up, so be sure to book promptly to avoid disappointment. Below is…
Poetry School
Smears & Caresses: The Poetry of Abstract Art
How can abstract art help poets? It makes us look and it makes us think, and it makes us think about our thoughts. It helps to steer us away from pre-existing categories. We cannot glance at it and then say ‘Nice goat’, or ‘Evocative seascape’, or ‘What a lovely cottage!’. Instead, we interact with the…
Peter Hughes
Autumn 2020 – Quick Course Guide
The leaves are green and the sun is still shining, but we’re already looking forward to the Autumn Term here at the Poetry School! Our Autumn Term is now live and we’ve got a whole host of brilliant tutors and courses lined up, so be sure to book promptly to avoid disappointment. Below is our…
Poetry School