Poetry in Aldeburgh Residency
‘Apple Pie in Pizzaland’ by Maura Dooley and a new writing prompt from Ben Rogers
Today’s poem featured at the very first Aldeburgh Poetry Festival held back in 1989. It describes a meeting in a pizza restaurant where both individuals are painfully “apologising to one another” and fiddling with menus and cutlery, before a sudden flight of imagination sees the restaurant, along with the rest of the country, being magically…
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‘If I lay on my back I saw nothing but naked women’ by Jacqueline Saphra and a new writing prompt from Ben Rogers
Today’s poem is an extract from If I lay on my back I saw nothing but naked women, a sequence of prose poems by Jacqueline Saphra, illustrated with linocut prints by Mark Andrew Webber. Told from a child’s perspective, the poems recount quirky, sometimes unnerving, scenes of family life, featuring a cast of eccentric parents…
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Poetry in Aldeburgh Residency: Ben Rogers interviews… Jacqueline Saphra
An Interview with Jacqueline Saphra
“Say whatever you want, invent what you like, use your imagination – that’s what writers do, for god’s sake – if it strengthens the poem.”
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Poetry in Aldeburgh Residency: Ben Rogers interviews… Holly Corfield Carr
An Interview with Holly Corfield Carr
As soon as we talk about ‘chance’ we’ve already stationed part of the writing process outside ourselves. We decide on names for this other part, like ‘found’ or ‘inspiration’ or something else, but we are always just writing back to what we have already recognised, writing back to ourselves, collaborating with the back of our heads.
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Aft by Holly Corfield Carr and a new writing prompt from Ben Rogers
Poem of the Day – AFT by Holly Corfield Carr Today’s poem was a site-specific piece commissioned by Spike Island (a centre for contemporary art and design based in Bristol) with Bristol Ferry. Written while listening to the sea shanties of a Bristol sailor recorded in 1950, Holly Corfield Carr created a poem whose couplets were…
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An Intimate Dinner with Raised Voices by Anna Selby and a new writing prompt from Ben Rogers
Poetry in Aldeburgh Countdown – An Intimate Dinner with Raised Voices by Anna Selby Today’s poem is a disconcertingly noisy sonnet taken from Anna Selby’s pamphlet ‘The Burning’. In the poem, sounds are amplified in a way that they are not supposed to, the result of a house that “overreacts”, a cacophony from which there is no…
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Phone call from… by Susan Utting and a new writing prompt from Ben Rogers
Writing Prompt – Phone Eavesdrop by Ben Rogers There is of course an ethical issue to listening to other people’s conversations in secret. However, with the rise of mobile phones there is an associated increase in the number of conversations (or at least one side of them) that you can hear with little or no effort, sometimes…
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Poetry in Aldeburgh residency: Ben Rogers interviews… Julia Bird
An Interview with Julia Bird
“What motivates me to produce, promote or write anything is the idea that there will be people around to receive it meaningfully”
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Poetry in Aldeburgh residency: Ben Rogers interviews… Hannah Lowe
An Interview with Hannah Lowe
In the latest collection, Chan, I’ve tried to push form a bit more, writing in a new form I’ve called a “borderliner”, a conflation of a bold and non bold poem which can be read vertically and horizontally, but which fits into a block of text.
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Poetry in Aldeburgh – National Poetry Day
Poem of the Day To celebrate National Poetry Day 2016 and its theme of messages, here is an extract from a classic WH Auden poem that forms one of his collaborations with Benjamin Britten, the famous English composer and Aldeburgh resident. Here, Auden’s verse acts as a closing commentary to a short film documentary on…
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Poetry in Aldeburgh Countdown – Poem of the Day & Writing Prompt
Poem of the Day This is the first poem in a sequence of prose poems by Tamar Yoseloff that originally accompanied drawings by the artist David Harker in the limited edition pamphlet ‘Nowheres’. Each image is a depiction of an unpopulated in-between space that appears unremarkable and which are, in the poet’s words, “not destinations”…
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Interview with Ben Rogers, Poet-in-Residence at Poetry in Aldeburgh Festival
Hi Ben! You recently had a recce trip to Aldeburgh in advance of your residency. How’s it all looking there at the moment? Before the recce trip I hadn’t visited Aldeburgh for many a year and then it was a swift visit at sundown to wolf fish and chips on the beach sitting near…
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