Courses
“I’ve been told not to say ‘puppy’ or ‘rainbow’ and not to shout ‘fire'”: Eric Berlin’s Stand-Up Poetry Studio
Our online programme producer, Will Barrett, talks comedy & poetry with National Poetry Competition winner Eric Berlin ahead of his Autumn online course, Stand-Up Poetry Studio. Hi Eric – it’s open mic night at the Goofy Moose. What’s your opening joke? Eric: Well, I think most people actually hate jokes. Being told a bunch of jokes…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Pamphlet / Portfolio: An Interview with Wayne Holloway-Smith
We sat down with Geoffrey Dearmer Prize-winner Wayne Holloway-Smith ahead of his new Pamphlet / Portfolio three-term course, designed to help guide your work to publication. Hi Wayne. You’re running a course for us called Pamphlet / Portfolio. Could you tell us a little bit about that? I’m particularly interested at the moment in the conversation…
Poetry School
To Be Continued… A Life in Sequences
I’ve written about place for as long as I’ve written poems. It fascinates me. For several years I struggled every which way I can think of to try and put into poetry the plural layers of reality, history, lived experience, interpretations and personal myth that we experience in the places we know well. Often, trying…
Suzannah Evans
Stand-up Poetry Studio: Uncovering a Way Between Speech and Song
The first time I remember wanting to be a poet — I mean, trying to figure out what I could do next in order to immediately start becoming one — was when I saw Philip Levine read at Boston University in 1994. Between one poem about the power dying in the steel mill where he…
Eric Berlin
LETZ MEDDLE ENGLISH: Speaking with Accents & Meddling in English
Each time I walk to the station in my district of Greater Copenhagen, I see LETZ SUSHI in bold white font on the black rectangle screwed to the brick wall. And each time I smile, though I must have seen this sign hundreds of times (I moved to Denmark in 2009). I’m never tired of…
Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese
New Definitions and Neologisms: Interview with Kate Potts
Ahead of her summer one-day workshop on The Poetry of Dictionaries, we caught up with Kate Potts to find out what students can expect. JT: Hi Kate. Thanks for answering a few questions for us! So New Definitions and Neologisms: The Poetry of Dictionaries – it’s quite a workshop title! Can you tell us a little more…
James Trevelyan (Poetry School)
‘The Art of Memory: Poetry of the Past and Present’
Memory is who we are. It is the story that we tell ourselves about where we come from and how we got to be here now. At the same time, our sense of the past is constantly shifting. We re-interpret it in the re-telling and adapt our past to our present purposes. My new online…
David Clarke
‘The Zoo of the New: Writing Childhood and Family’
Would you be a child again? For all its wonder, innocence, joy and freedom, childhood can also be full of insecurity, confusion and darkness. After all, it is a land of extremes where every feeling, no matter how transitory, is worn on the face. Children cannot help expressing their authentic selves, regardless of the situation….
Victoria Kennefick
‘I sing the praises of a fart’: On Keeping Our Wits
More than ever, we need to keep our wits about us. If our shared reality seems increasingly topsy turvy, our need for wit – as a way of seriously and playfully experimenting with language and digesting diverse experiences – must be at its greatest. It’s a subject we’ll be exploring closely on my upcoming online course, Keeping…
Will Harris
‘Thought, in poetry, is felt’
Alright, sometimes a poem can be too conceptual, too austerely cerebral, too loftily academic, too preeningly intellectual, too all-round thinky. Sure. But only as much as other poems can be too runnily sentimental, too intellectually lazy and biddable. Surely some kind of middle ground is in order, then? I believe that this middle ground should…
Joey Connolly
Melting identities: does it matter where you are from?
There is no doubt about it: the world is changing, and changing quickly. As people travel from one place to another to work or live, they create increasingly multicultural communities where different ideas, customs and languages interact, combine and clash. In London, for example, the streets are filled with the cadences of different dialects as people…
Jennifer Wong
Pattern is not an algorithm: on poetry and pattern
Pattern in poetry is not just an algorithm at work, i.e., ‘the poem that writes itself’. In fact, it might be said that anything that writes itself, whether it be a moral code, a way of handling people, an approach of giving a percentage of income to charity, is bound for trouble. We live in…
Ira Lightman
To Sea in a Sieve: The Joy of Writing Children’s Poetry
Whenever I talk about children’s poetry, I end up using the word ‘joy’. Multiple times. Sometimes I throw in a ‘delight’ or two as well. I’ll do that here, too, because it’s the key point I want to get across: it is a total joy to read, write and perform children’s poetry, and one I…
Rachel Piercey
Islands, poetry and getting away from it all
I remember giving a set of poems at ‘Reading the Leaves’, a night in Tchai Ovna in Glasgow where I liked to try out new work alongside other poets, novelists and writers. The poems in my set were mostly new, and seemed to arise independently of one another, but a striking commonality revealed itself as…
Christie Williamson
Haiku Rebellion: An interview with Lynne Rees
An Interview with Lynne Rees
“I think there’s a democratic aspect to haiku that persists in Japan and in the West that’s very appealing: groups of ordinary people meet to write and share their haiku and, inevitably, their lives”
James Trevelyan (Poetry School)
Anti-Poetry for today: Melissa Lee-Houghton looks to reinvent Dada
This is a course for people who want to do something new and respond to the world around them by writing poems which engage with the fizzing energy and anarchic vibe of Dada whilst exploring contemporary art, film and writing and assimilating the current political climate. So what will poets be doing on this course?…
Melissa Lee-Houghton
Adventures in the Blind Field: An Interview with Sally Flint
An Interview with Sally Flint
“The art of really looking intrigues me – especially how poets interpret, use and move beyond what they see“
James Trevelyan (Poetry School)
A Tale from the World City: David Tait
“Leaving there and proceeding for three days toward the east, you will reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theatre, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower. All these beauties will already be familiar to the visitor, who has…
David Tait
Site-Seeing: An Interview with Holly Corfield Carr
An Interview with Holly Corfield Carr
“Writing poems for particular places might change the way we write, but finding places to write particular poems changes the way we move through the world”
James Trevelyan (Poetry School)
Ryan Van Winkle’s Blues Gallery
This Autumn, we introduce a new course format on CAMPUS: the Poetry Studio. These will be three-week intensive writing sessions, with inspirational challenges designed for you to get as many poems on the page as possible. We’ve called on our poetry podcaster extraordinaire, Ryan Van Winkle, to take charge of the first of these in September…
James Trevelyan (Poetry School)
The Stanza: Why do poems have them?
I have a fair few books about writing poetry on my shelves, some more helpful and inspiring than others. They do seem to have one thing in common, though: while they spend plenty of time talking about the poetic line, they have nothing much to say about the stanza. They may discuss set forms of…
David Clarke
The Bloodjet: An Interview with Katrina Naomi
An Interview with Katrina Naomi
“I think the main thing for me is if you’re going to write about violence, do it well. Let us smell it, taste it.”
Ali Lewis
How to Collaborate with Yourself
One of my favourite comics is Robot Hugs’ Identity Shift. It’s addressed to folk exploring gender and sexuality, reassuring them about the anxieties that come when identity shifts and changes over time, but it makes a broader and stranger point: that all of us present ourselves as different people in different places. The face we…
Harry Josephine Giles
Making Birds: an Interview with R.A. Villanueva
An Interview with R.A. Villanueva
R.A. Villanueva is an award-winning Filipino-American poet and founding editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art. His first collection, Reliquaria, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and new writing appears in Poetry, Prac Crit and widely elsewhere. Now living in the UK, Ron’ll be teaching the Summer Term course Making Birds: New Poetic…
Ali Lewis
‘Readers of Faces: Poetry as Portraiture’
“Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.” – Adrian Mitchell I like people. I like reading about them. I like talking to them and getting to know them. I like writing about them. It might just be age, but these days I can’t think of anything worse than meditating on my…
Sarah Hesketh