Courses
‘Long Poems & Invocations: Making the Measure Work for You’
Often teachers tell poets to hone, edit and show not tell, or use language more sparingly, but what if we want to rage and roam, and embrace the mental rollercoaster ride which is the long poem? Writing a long poem can be a chance to immerse yourself in the subconscious and surprise yourself with the…
Melissa Lee-Houghton
‘A Life on the Edge: Hinterlands and Homelands’
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales console the lodger looking out across a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls a child’s name as though they named their loss. Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer – Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre. ‘Prayer’ by Carol Ann Duffy The number of people who will have…
Holly Hopkins
‘The Word made Fresh’ – Restoring the Bible to English Poetry
My history with the Bible goes back a long way and has materially influenced the course of my life as well as my intellectual, artistic and religious development. As a militant teenage atheist from an a-religious background, I would nevertheless regularly read the King James Bible — as ‘literature’ (that is, for enjoyment) but also…
Steve Ely
Announcing our Spring 2016 Courses!
Here’s a quick look at what’s on offer for our Spring Term (beginning 25 January 2016). To find out about a particular course or tutor, follow the title links or call us to enquire on 0207 582 1679. If you’d like to print out a copy of our brochure to look through at home, you can…
Poetry SchoolVisiting the Dead
When I was 5 years old, my father left us and set up home with a wealthy, erratic, glamorous Mexican woman. His Karmic payback was that whilst he left our mother a single parent of two, he, within a decade, was a single parent of three. Hence, I have half-siblings who are glamorous and fairly…
Anna RobinsonRe-writing Dante
T S Eliot’s genius for quotation gave me my first taste of Dante: the marvellous epigraph to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and a line at the end of ‘The Waste Land’ – “Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina” (“then he hid himself in the fire that refines them”). Torn out of…
Edmund PrestwichWinning Ways to Make the Shortlist: an Interview with Saradha Soobrayen
An Interview with Saradha Soobrayen
With the change in seasons comes the next wave of competitions, prizes, awards and schemes for poets in the UK. Already thinking about your submissions? Poet, mentor and facilitator Saradha Soobrayen is on hand to help, with her course Winning Ways to Make the Shortlist providing 30 editing tools and writing strategies to help you get…
Poetry School‘Creatrix: Women’s Poetries for the 21st Century’
In the Honours year of my undergrad degree in English Literature, I signed up for a module called Modern Poetry. When the student gaggle – twelve or so of us – arrived for the first seminar, our tutor announced that he wanted to talk to us about the “politics” of the course content before we…
Claire AskewSounds and Sweet Airs
Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises… I’m writing this in the back room of our house, overlooking a meeting of gardens. We’re underneath a flight path, and this morning the planes are roaring in, low, carrying the summer visitors and returners to London. In between, a robin’s ticking of alarm reaches me,…
Meryl PughRoutes Poets Publish
This beautiful object is a pamphlet created by students from last year’s Routes into Poetry course, Tamar Yoseloff’s regular nuts and bolts craft class for beginners. The pamphlet contains work by Ruth Steadman, Jonathan Hart, Tom Clark, Jess Murrain, Clare Whittle, Leonardo Boix, Stef Bottinelli, Barbara Dillon, Anjila Sinha, Paul Lee-Maynard, Analia Padin and Jenni…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)Cosmos and discovery: an interview with Claire Trévien
An Interview with Claire Trévien
Ah the astronomer’s lot. Now cool again thanks to Brian Cox, but in principle only really fathomable if you have a degree in astrophysics, a finer understanding of stellar mass spectrums, and a very expensive telescope. To an easily confused outsider (which is exactly what I am) it used to be the wonder expressed at things…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)The raw material of language: an interview with Victoria Bean
An Interview with Victoria Bean
Victoria Bean is a visual poet and the co-tutor of our upcoming Online Reading Group, ‘The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century’. Victoria has been working over the last 3 years with Chris McCabe (another Poetry School tutor) to put together a major anthology of new approaches, ideas and techniques being used in visual…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)Master Your Manuscript
A special offer, a special offer! This poetry manuscript wrangling course is open to everyone, but for the under 30s, it’s half price. That’s because we know it’s Gregory submission time coming up, and we’d like to help out. Here are the course details … Winning Ways to Make the Shortlist Tutor: Saradha Soobrayen Day…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)‘A Poet’s Field Guide: Close Reading & Writing’
You’re out in the field, walking, and you see something move out of the corner of your eye. What is it? A poem? Are you sure? Can you narrow it down, what sort? How does it, well, fly? Okay, perhaps the metaphor is a little strained, but identifying a bird and knowing how to approach…
Dan EltringhamThe Poetry of Wolf Hall: an Interview with Ellen Cranitch
An Interview with Ellen Cranitch
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 10 years (not the strangest thing a poet has ever done) you’ll be aware of Wolf Hall, the literary phenomenon by Hilary Mantel, which was recently adapted into one of the most critically acclaimed TV serials in British television history. As we eagerly wait for…
Shane RounceThe New Concrete: an online reading course in attentive poetics
One of the narratives of visual poetry since the 1950s is that the form has become one that can be taken up by any poet at some stage of their writing life. The concrete movement had such a strong impact that it’s impossible not to write poetry and to consider, at some point, how these…
Chris McCabe‘The Poetry Postbox’
When I feel stuck, exhausted, fog-brained, knotted up, or like I’ll never write another poem again, I sit down and write a letter. Not as an exercise— a real letter to someone, that will be posted. I write the letter by hand, and often look around to see if I can find anything to make…
Miriam NashMondo: The Global Avant Garde
I’ve run three courses for the Poetry School so far, all of which have been about avant-garde poetry. Covering specific movements in European, British and World avant-garde writing, I’ve been able to communicate things I’m passionate about to successively erudite and enthusiastic course participants. Here’s what’s coming up for the Autumn Term… Mondo: The Global…
sjfowlerPoetry and Comics
Poetry and Comics don’t need each other to communicate, and yet Poetry Comics have been around for a while. The New York School Poets, Joe Brainard in particular, created comics which used poetic text, and the idea seems to have grown from there. In the eighties an American writer and educator called Dave Morice published…
Chrissy Williams
Saturday Sessions: an Interview with Ros Barber
An Interview with Ros Barber
We caught up with poet and novelist Ros Barber ahead of her next term of Saturday Sessions: a monthly workshop course of feedback, discussion and writing for poets… Hi Ros! Your new book, Devotion, has just been published – could you tell us more about that? It’s a novel, following up on the success of my…
Poetry SchoolDevouring and Creation: the Poetry of Food and that which Feeds our Poetry
In both his letters and his poetry, John Keats implored artists to “live unpoetically” by focusing on an “acuteness of vision”. This means listening, watching, touching and tasting what is going on around us every day. We do not isolate special occasions in order to squeeze out a poem, we are moved by something that…
rosie shepperdPoetry Studio: an Interview with Fiona Hamilton
An Interview with Fiona Hamilton
We caught up with poet and tutor Fiona Hamilton to find out more about her new course in Bristol, Poetry Studio, starting 16 September… Hi Fiona! What poetry are you reading at the moment? Today I read poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (‘Don’t Let That Horse’), Wendy Cope (‘The Uncertainty of the Poet’) and R.S. Thomas…
Poetry SchoolCreatrix: an Interview with Claire Askew
An Interview with Claire Askew
Expectations, categorisations and loaded words: we caught up with poet and tutor Claire Askew to find out more about her Autumn Term course, ‘Creatrix: Women’s Poetries for the 21st Century’: Hi Clare! How’s your summer shaping up? Claire: Great, thanks! I’m just back from a holiday/research trip to Cornwall: I’m doing research into English witchcraft for…
Shane RounceOBJECTIVE/ MINIMAL /”ISM”
I first emerged from my obsession with Ezra Pound in the early 1990s. Then like a lot of Poundians, I went to the poets I’d heard were collected in the New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen, but not to the anthology itself; to the critical books of Marjorie Perloff, themselves full of generous chunks…
Ira Lightmantry to build a pamphlet: Transreading Central Europe
Not just new ways to write, the Poetry School’s Transreading Central Europe course was about experiments in reading. For the 10 weeks of the course, myself and other students puzzled over languages we barely understood to create poems based on the sounds or shapes of Polish, Slovene or Hungarian (homophonic translation)—which in my case had…
Rob Packer