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The Complete Works Poetry – call for submissions
An update from our friends at The Complete Works … The Complete Works Poetry (TCW 3) Deadline: February 14th, 2016 Are you a Black or Asian poet at the stage where you are committed to producing a full-length collection? Would you benefit from a tailored programme of support and career development? Funded by Arts Council England…
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How I Translated It: ‘When I left you, afterwards’ by Brecht
Some notes on my translation of Brecht’s ‘Als ich nachher von dir ging …’ and some hints on translation more generally. First the text itself, with a very literal interlinear translation: Als ich nachher von dir ging When I afterwards from you went An dem großen Heute On the great today Sah ich, wie…
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I do not believe in silence.
I’m guessing the fact that you’re here online means that you don’t just enjoy reading poetry – you also like to read about it. Me too. In fact, sometimes I enjoy it even more than poetry itself. The Life of Poetry by Muriel Rukeyser is a case in point. I first read this book on…
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How I Translated It: The Poetry of Sarah Kirsch (1935-2013) by Anne Stokes
I first came across the poetry of the German poet Sarah Kirsch when studying East German literature. But I returned to her work more recently in an attempt to understand more about how free verse functioned by entering Kirsch’s poems through the close reading and mimicry required when translating. My main interest in Kirsch’s poems…
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A Bibliophile’s Farewell
Time is like a fashionable host That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand, And with his arms outstretch’d, as he would fly, Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles, And farewell goes out sighing. – Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida It is with both sighs and smiles that I thank you all…
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The Bookseller’s Flair
My last post explored the significance of libraries and the unique personal collections we treasure at home. But how do you go about building one? Walter Benjamin writes of the “thrill of acquisition” in ‘Unpacking My Library’, his jovial essay on book collecting. Acquiring books is by no means “a matter of money or expert…
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The Library: Paradise Lost?
There are countless articles listing examples of the ‘most beautiful libraries in the world’. All are utterly spectacular, and show what pride communities have in these repositories of shared wisdom. Even the personal libraries we harbour at home gather value and significance as we add to them over the years: in Erasmus’ words, “Your…
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The Art Of Illustration
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures…
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Aura and Artists’ Books
Kindles, Nooks, iPads, Portable Reader Systems – for some, electronic books are an ingenious invention. Slender and lightweight with vast storage and interactive controllable viewing screens, they are the latest stage of evolution for the book in today’s digital age. And so why do I shudder at the thought of empty bookshelves and identical…
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CAMPUS Debate: Poetry Books – Do Looks Matter?
Can you judge a book by its cover? There’s only one way to find out – CAMPUS debate time! For the ayes we have Annie Freud, and the noes with have Patrick Davidson Roberts. Let the literary death match begin… YES Annie Freud When I say that looks matter when it comes to poetry…
Read MoreModern Day Masters
No discussion of craft and design would be complete without mention of “the Master-craftsman” – William Morris. Inspiring the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th/early 20th century, his genius spread to all fields, including household fabrics, wallpapers and furniture, stained glass and tapestry, poetry, translation and novels, political activism and reform……
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Primers Shortlist Announced!
This July, we set up a virtual in-tray and invited submissions to a new publishing and mentoring programme in association with Nine Arches Press. Our Primers scheme will find three new poets whose work we’d like to foster, publish and promote. 2,316 poems later, Judges Jane Commane and Kathryn Maris are delighted to announce the…
Read MoreThe Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Oscar Wilde & Lord Alfred Douglas
You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty. – Oscar Wilde, De Profundis In 1891 Oscar Wilde met Lord Alfred Douglas in the architectural jewel-town of Rouen. Douglas was…
Read MoreA Personal Preface
As a child I wrote many a “happy song”, often compiling them in books of my own construction with accompanying drawings. Thankfully these weren’t such “that all may read”, but remained private, incompletely formed little objects that I enjoyed making and owning. Since then I’ve been learning about the bookmaking process and how techniques…
Read MoreRebellious Love: Allen Ginsberg & Peter Orlovsky
When Allen Ginsberg first laid admiring eyes on Peter Orlovsky in 1954 in a flat in San Francisco, he was naked in a painting with tousled yellow hair and a beguiling gaze. He asked the artist who it was posing, and Orlovsky was called from the other room, transmogrified into reality, fully clothed. It was…
Read MoreLove and Suicide: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes
The most notorious, politicized and doomed literary couple in history. Sylvia Plath was charmed into hunting out Ted Hughes after reading his poem ‘Hawk in The Rain’, and in 1956 she met his powerful and imposing presence at a party in Cambridge, ‘kiss me, and you will see how important I am’ she wrote in…
Read MoreTrue Love: Anais Nin & Henry Miller
“Life and literature combined, love the dynamo, you with your chameleon’s soul giving me a thousand loves, being anchored always in no matter what storm, home wherever we are. In the mornings, continuing where we left off. Resurrection after resurrection. You asserting yourself, getting the rich varied life you desire; and the more you…
Read MoreJealous Love: Natalie Barney & Renée Vivien
These wild women were Symbolist poets in literary Paris at the turn of the 20th century, culturally advantaged and intellectually determined. They were Women of The Left Bank who set up boutiques: publishing houses and artistic salons across the city forging a Sapphic Utopia with their grandiose gestures of a luxury-bohemian, women-centred lifestyle, a place…
Read MoreQuiet Love: Virginia Woolf & Vita Sackville West
From this week I’m going to be briefly sketching some of my favourite writer romances of the last couple of centuries, starting with today’s coupling: Virginia Woolf & Vita Sackville West. These two female authors living in the heart of Edwardian England became lovers in 1925 when they met over dinner. Sackville-West wrote after the meeting…
Read MoreSounds 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,…
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A line about orange: thoughts on poets and painters
I have always been interested in the relationship between art and poetry. For many years now, I have been using art as a way of stimulating my poetic practice, sometimes by channeling the dead – such as Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly – but also by collaborating with living artists – such as Linda Karshan,…
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Writers Who Love Writers
A friend of mine once pointed out that as poets we are indefinitely not like everyone else. Perhaps others don’t stick their heads into things as we do, they don’t get caught up in their emotions – and suddenly in the middle of a busy bar feeling something close to what Stendhal felt in Florence…
Read MoreMondo: 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…
Read MorePoetry 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…
Read MoreDevouring 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…
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