Blog
‘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
Actor and spectator: poetry, film, and the paradox of viewing
The history of film could almost be divided into two obsessions: one with narrative and storytelling, the other with experimentation. My upcoming online course, Frame, Shot, Scene, Sequence: Powering Poetry Through Film, will explore how both modes can offer a vast array of opportunities to poets. Since the emergence of film in the late 19th…
John Challis
How I Did It – Ted Hughes Award: Will Eaves on ‘The Inevitable Gift Shop’
In the second instalment of our Ted Hughes Award ‘How I Did It’ series, Will Eaves explains the creative process behind ‘The Lord Is Listenin’ To Ya, Hallelujah’ from his shortlisted work The Inevitable Gift Shop. A memoir by other means, The Inevitable Gift Shop lassoes consciousness, memory, desire, literature, illness, flora and fauna, problems with tortoises…
Will Eaves
Announcing the Mixed Borders 2017 Poets
StAnza’s been and gone, the Ted Hughes Award announcements are on their way — but there’s a gap in the Spring poetry calendar that The Poetry School is still to fill. It’s time for this year’s Mixed Borders. Mixed Borders is a regular collaboration between the Poetry School and the London Parks and Gardens Trust. We…
Poetry School
‘A Quiet Passion’ Instagram Poetry Competition
The Poetry School and Soda Pictures are delighted to announce a new poetry competition to mark the release of A Quiet Passion – a new biopic of Emily Dickinson (in cinemas 7 April). The story of 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson is brought to vivid life in this sensitive biopic by director Terence Davies,…
Poetry School
The Summer 2017 Programme — in two lines or less!
One-Term Short Courses: Stand-alone courses comprising five two-hour sessions over ten weeks in one of our London classrooms. The Pamphleteers with Saradha Soobrayen: Write, select, arrange and edit poems for your pamphlet with Saradha Soobrayen. #Afterhours with Inua Ellams: Discuss, dissect and explore various ways into writing counter or companion pieces to poems from the canon….
Poetry School
Poetry and Visual Art: Gallery Day Schedule – 18th February
This is the finalised schedule for the gallery day of Tamar Yoseloff’s Poetry and Visual Art two-day course. You can find more details of the course here. 10:30am: Gagosian, 6-24 Britannia Street (off Grays Inn Road) London WC1X 9JD King’s Cross / St Pancras Tube / Rail – Euston Road exit (10 mins) Richard…
Poetry School
Mixed Borders: Poet in Residence Training – Apply Now!
Lover of flowers and/or vegetables? Want some poet-in-residence training? Read on, we have an opportunity for you! For the last two years, the Poetry School and London Parks and Gardens Trust have teamed up for a poet-in-residence training scheme centred on London’s Gardens. We call the scheme ‘Mixed Borders’. “I felt like the training greatly…
Ali Lewis
Give It To ‘Em Straight: An Interview with Alex MacDonald
Alex MacDonald, Eric Gregory Award-winning poet and co-editor at poetry journal Poems in Which, will be running our Spring 2017 course Give It To ‘Em Straight. We caught up with him for a short chat about the course, and what he’s up to at the moment. Your upcoming course with us is called ‘Give It To ‘Em…
Andrew Parkes (Poetry School)
Blake in Lambeth Print Gallery
How do you fill a page? Poets scratch out one line at a time, darkening the paper slowly from top to bottom – but a visual artist will make one swoosh of a brush, and that’s their canvas completely full of colour and intent. Poets and artists swapped their page-making practices this Autumn in the…
Poetry School
How I Did It – Michael Marks Edition: Polly Clark ‘Tiger, Tiger’
‘Tiger, Tiger’ from my pamphlet A Handbook for the Afterlife is my longest and perhaps most ambitious poem, abandoning the strict notions I held of what a poem is or can be. For a long time it was in my head rather than on the page as a draft because the idea of it –…
Polly Clark
How I Did It: Michael Marks Edition: Fiona Moore ‘Sleep Sonnet’
SLEEP SONNET I last touched the world of sleep at midday when sun shone through and through a train and the woman opposite was painting her nails an ocean of deep red stations trailed unreal names jolted words away from language upholstered in grey/blue now through night without corridors or sleep or stars my mind…
Fiona Moore
Derivatives, Reflection, Homage: An Interview with Róisín Tierney
The Michael Marks Award-winning poet Róisín Tierney will be running our Spring 2017 course ‘Derivatives, Reflection, Homage‘. We caught up with her for a chat about the course, and what she’s up to at the moment. Hi Róisín. Your new course with us is called ‘Derivatives, Reflection, Homage’. Could you tell us a little bit about your…
Ali Lewis
How I Did It – Michael Marks Edition – ‘Anne Whittle (alias Chattox)’
“Wigged w/ cirrus”, “I shall be in a woman’s likeness…” and “LISTEN”: these are among the first notes I put toward the Malkin sequence, scribbling with sudden enthusiasm on a train from Lancaster to Cambridge back in June 2014 (the muses, as has been well-documented, often take the train). The Pendle Witches had fascinated me…
Camille Ralphs
40% off Poetry London subscriptions for Poetry School Students!
As a special offer for this term, students who book a course or one-day workshop at the Poetry School can get a year’s subscription to Poetry London for just £15 – 40% off the standard price of £25! Poetry London is an arts charity and leading international poetry magazine where acclaimed contemporary poets share pages…
Poetry School
Rachel Long Wins Paterson / Poetry School Competition
And that’s a wrap on the Poetry School / Soda Pictures Paterson competiton! Thank you to all of you who entered your diary poems. We loved reading your various approaches to the quotidian. A lot of autumn leaves were fluttering about in your poems, many cats were frolicking among them, and Donald Trump was the…
Poetry School
The Spring 2017 Programme – in two lines or less!
Taking our lead from David Tait and Jennie Osborne this term, we’ve tried to give a concise run-down of our Spring 2017 courses, using just two lines or less! Short Courses A Conversation with the Past (Modernisms) with Tim Dooley: Consider how the innovations of modernism influenced the direction of poetry and workshop new poems in…
Poetry School
“Battle of the Somme” Centenary – Collaboration Opportunity with Simon Barraclough
Attention all – we have a new opportunity to announce! From 2014-18, a huge range of cultural activities are taking place across the UK to mark the centenary of the First World War. The focus of 2016’s commemorations is the Battle of the Somme – or the film of the same name that was released…
Poetry School
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
How I Did It: Poem in Which…
In darker periods, I spend far too many hours Wikipedia-hopping: clicking from link to link and half-learning all sorts of extraordinary things. I find Wikipedia a real horde of things to write about and poems to find. My favourite articles are the list pages, and the best of these (and a good portal to further…
Harry Josephine Giles
Shey Hargreaves reads ‘Death at Sea’ and ‘Junior Doctors’
Shey Hargreaves, our former Digital Poet-in-Residence with 1215.today, reads two of the poems written during her residency. The poems are also hosted over on the 1215.today site. Junior Doctors is “an homage to all those toiling long, red-eyed hours in the fluorescent throb of hospital corridor”. You can read Shey’s blog post and poem about the…
Ali Lewis
How I Did It: ‘Interlude’
This poem was the first poem I tried to write after a period of about three years during which I didn’t write at all. During this time, I was making some significant discoveries about my family, my mother and myself, unpicking the deep legacies of intergenerational trauma. One day, after work, I took myself to…
Ruby Robinson