Courses
The Double-image of Poetry and Photography
Creative mediums are not indefinable. They have essential elements that mean they are not something else at root. But their practise is not best served by recourse to the ‘it is whatever you want it to be’ line of thinking. I mean, that’s fine, of course – people can think what they like – but…
sjfowler
What is Science Fiction Poetry?
Poetry often confines itself to the ‘real’ world, the world of nature or the city, relationships or the inner life. It is a counterpart to the novels of literary fiction which deal with these themes. But what about the themes covered by so-called genre fiction, speculation about the future, or life beyond the Earth? There…
Callie Gardner
Someone Else’s Shoes: Poetic Monologue
Poetry is escape. The bloke at the desk there, not moving at all, not even seeing us as we step into his room now, but staring into space, tapping perhaps his pen against his teeth, or leaning now to squint closely at a sheet of paper, alive with these squiggly, wriggly marks which contain all…
Jonathan Edwards
Bridging Two Different Lands: Identity & Place
Ahead of her upcoming workshop, Romalyn Ante writes of the power of place in making us who we are The city teaches the man – Simonides The concepts of place and identity have always been interlinked, whether in geography, environmental psychology, urban planning, or ecocriticism. In this one-day workshop we will explore how…
romalyn ante
Ancient Tongues and Hybrid Texts
Ahead of his upcoming course in Bristol, Rowan Evans writes about the intricate link between ancient languages and experimental poetry. Language started shaking ok the day started shaking ok words are a matter of shaking – Caroline Bergvall, Drift (Nightboat Books, 2014). This Autumn I begin practice-based PhD research at Royal Holloway,…
Rowan Evans
Fuck Lyric
Ahead of his upcoming online course, Joey Connolly writes on the politics of ‘the lyric’. In an unnamed poem in her 2017 book Fourth Person Singular, Nuar Alsadir writes: ‘On the local platform at 86th Street waiting for a 6 Train, I noticed, written on a column in thick Sharpie, “Fuck Lyric:” I…
Joey Connolly
‘My ghost you needn’t look for’ – Searching for Robinson Jeffers
The Venice of my birth, a far cry from Casanova’s Serene Republic, at whose spectre tourists chase to the tune of hundreds of euros a day, had already been pimped out to cruise-ships by the time I had learned to walk in the late 1980s. A stone’s throw from its noxious canals, life on the mainland…
André Naffis-Sahely
Get Stuffed: Why We Need to Pay Attention to Things
Lately, Stuff has been on my mind – reading, writing, life. We’ve just moved into our first home and have installed U. A. Fanthorpe’s ‘Atlas’ in a frame on the wall. It’s a great example of how the largest themes can emerge from ‘storing the WD40 and knowing when to use it’ [sic]. I now…
Caleb Parkin
‘It feels like a time of poetry again’ – the Revolutionary Moment(s) of 1968
Obsessed, bewildered . By the shipwreck Of the singular . We have chosen the meaning Of being numerous. . (George Oppen) In Giedre Zickyte’s 2012 film How We Played The Revolution a Lithuanian politician looks back to the time when his country peacefully withdrew from the Soviet Union. ‘It was a time of poetry,’ he…
Gloria Dawson
Please – No More Poetry: Writing in Response to Trauma
The idea for my upcoming online course – Please – No More Poetry – began with a question that has occupied my thoughts for many years now: what is the relationship between poetry and trauma? In a conversation with my doctoral supervisor – a wise scholar and wonderful poet – I described my fascination with…
Anna Veprinska
Against English: an interview with Harry Giles
Will Barrett: Hi Harry. Tell us about your upcoming course with the Poetry School, ‘Against English: Dialects, Distortions and New Vocabularies’. Harry Giles: Hi! ‘Against English’ grew out of a one-off session I did with the Poetry School a few years ago, exploring the overlaps between writing in regional dialects, in experimental constraints, and in sound…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Digital Poetry Beyond the Prehistoric
I think digital poetry is a genre that can offer poets exciting possibilities to create new work that explores and expands language. And that’s what I’m aiming to do with my new course at the Poetry School. Without disappearing down an internet wormhole ‘researching’ the topic of what is digital poetry, what are digital poetics…
Maya Chowdhry
The God in the Forest: Finding the Spiritual in Nature
In the Iliad, there is a passage where Zeus calls all the gods to an assembly on Mount Olympus. But it is not only the Olympians who come – along with them are all the streams, and the nymphs of the woods, the rivers and the meadows. The Homeric world is one in which nature…
Seán Hewitt
Course Quick Guide – Autumn 2018
Face-to-Face Courses London Three Term Courses: The first term of our flagship year-long courses (3 x 10 week terms) The Poet’s Toolkit (Autumn 2018) with Shazea Quraishi Explore poetry’s inner workings, hone your craft, and take a close look at various forms and techniques to help your poems achieve lift-off. Pamphlet / Portfolio…
Poetry School
Archiving Your Self Yourself: an interview with James Davies
James Davies is interviewed by James Davies – his uncannily named next-door neighbour – about his upcoming course for Poetry School, Archiving Your Self Yourself: Quantified Self Studio James Davies: Hi there James. How are things this morning? James Davies: Really really great James. Right now I’m dandy. I’m usually dandy. I see the birds….
James Davies
What is a Metic Poet?
The question most writers ask me at the beginning of a Metics workshop is ‘What is a Metic?’. The simple answer usually is: You are! A fish does not know it’s a fish until it leaves the water. The term ‘Metic’ means a foreigner whose allegiances are split between their homeland and their new country. Metic is a Greek word, which we might…
Nick Makoha
Talking Back: Poetry, Dialogue and Voice
In her 2017 collection Stranger Baby, Emily Berry stages a dialogue between voices living and dead, a sort of haunted (and haunting) psychodrama, both intimate and fiercely private: “I wish you would put some kind of distortion on my voice,” says the speaker in ‘The End’, “so people don’t know it’s me.” This is poetry…
Kate Potts
The Opposite House: But We Never Go In That Room!
[T]he borders of our minds are ever shifting, and…many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy. from ‘On Magic’ by W. B. Yeats. Childhood is a time when our brains are, as Yeats states, ‘ever shifting’. We are laying the…
Sarah Byrne
Fully Automated Radical Pessimism
Some of my favorite books to teach are dystopian, like George Orwell’s 1984, M.T Anderson’s Feed, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. All of these books inform my work, but especially Station Eleven. In the book, Mandel asks the question: what would survive in the end of the world? Shakespeare…
Leah Umansky
Naming the Hill: A Conversation with the Non-Human
Ahead of her new online course, Die Like a Wolf: Writing the Non-Human, Suzannah Evans discusses the non-human in her poem ‘Naming the Hill’, published for the first time here. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man…
Suzannah Evans
‘Why do dominant cultures translate so much?’
Translation is a hot topic. Search for ‘translation’ in Google and you’ll see numerous news stories; many are to do with an innovative array of emerging translation technologies – for example, earbuds that can translate languages in real time. Whereas human translators may find simultaneous translation mentally exhausting, machine translators can last as long as…
Nisha Ramayya
Why do we read, and write, taboos?
A few years ago I read Tiger Tiger, a controversial memoir by Margaux Fragoso which chronicles her long-term relationship with a 51-year old man, Peter, which began when she was just seven years old. As a culture, we are collectively repelled by paedophiles – the acts they engage in, or even fantasise about, with children…
Christina Thatcher
Two for Joy: Happy Poems
Sky entered and held surprise wide open (‘The Skylight’, Seamus Heaney) . It seems I was called for this: / To glorify things just because they are (‘Blacksmith Shop’, Czesław Miłosz, translated by the author and Robert Hass) . Pass the tambourine, let me bash out praises (‘The Way We Live’, Kathleen Jamie) Happiness…
Rachel Piercey
Transreading the Baltics
Want to see Riga? Or, for that matter, any other place in Latvia. Or Lithuania. Or Estonia… In July 2009 I moved out of Poland, which – five years after joining the European Union – hoped to be perceived as a central part of its continent, rather than its eastern addition. I moved out of…
Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese
Summer 2018 Courses Quick Guide
The Summer 2018 Term is now open for booking! We are delighted to open the booking period for the final term of our 20th anniversary year at the Poetry School. Remember that new students get 15% off all courses, just give us a call to get your discount! Concessions are available, and applications for bursaries –…
Ali Lewis