Blog
How I Did It: ‘The Ballad of the Small-Boned Daughter’
Shafilea Ahmed died in September 2003 aged 17. She was a British Pakistani girl from Warrington, Cheshire. She was a beautiful and spirited girl who was murdered in a so called ‘honour killing’ by her parents. Like so many others I watched the long gruesome trial in 2012 when her parents were finally convicted of…
Mona Arshi
Autumn 2015: New Courses and Workshops
Here’s a quick look at what’s on offer for our Autumn Term (beginning 14 September 2015). 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 SchoolMA in Writing Poetry – now open for applications
We are delighted to announce that our MA in Writing Poetry in collaboration with Newcastle University is now open for applications. The two year course starts in September 2015, and you can study in one of two centres: the Poetry School’s Lambeth Walk classrooms in London, or at Newcastle University itself. Both groups of students…
Poetry SchoolAn announcement from our Director
After six years as Director of the Poetry School, I will be stepping down from the role this summer. The Poetry School’s Board of Trustees will lead the search for a new Director with details of the recruitment process to be announced shortly. Although my time as Director will officially end in mid-August I will…
Ollie DawsonCAMPUS Debate: Poetry and Music in Performance
Poetry and music: a natural pairing? On instinct, yes! of course! why who hasn’t extolled a thumping good poem for its ‘musicality’, or raved about the ‘pure poetry’ of a great song? If you go back far enough to when nearly all verse was accompanied by flute and lyre, it’s hard to say whether poetry…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)Celebrate Your History: an Interview with Nick Field
An Interview with Nick Field
How can poetry express the joys, sensations and narratives of shared celebrations? In his new Summer School workshop ‘Celebrate Your History’, artist and writer Nick Field will be working with students to use autobiography to create powerful, joyful poems. We caught up with Nick to find out more… Hi Nick! Tell us a bit about…
Shane RounceMixed Borders: Who’s Where
Open Gardens Squares Weekend is just around the corner! On Saturday 13 and Sunday 14 June, you can explore over 200 private, secret and tucked away gardens across London. Our Mixed Borders Poets have taken up residence in 16 of the Open Gardens dotted across London. They’ve been visiting their gardens for the last month…
Poetry SchoolA run from the Pound
I’ve come to the end of my residency, which ran in tandem with my commission to write and present a documentary about Ezra Pound and economics (due out on Radio 4 this summer). It has been fantastically helpful for me, not least because I sometimes find it hard to see the wood for the trees,…
Ira LightmanFestival Season: A Glimpse at our Summer School
Our Summer School is designed so that students can fit in one last blast of poetry writing before the holidays: for a whole week in July, we’ll be running a series of workshops, some for a full day, some for the morning or the afternoon, so that you can fit them in around your packing…
Poetry SchoolEpiphanies and Other Movable Feasts: an Interview with Nichola Deane
An Interview with Nichola Deane
Part of our festival themed Summer School this July, Nichola Deane’s workshop Epiphanies and Other Movable Feasts will look at the ‘architecture of moments’ that make up our lives. We caught up with Nichola to find out more about what she has planned… Hi Nichola, tell us more about your workshop…what’s it all about? ND:…
Poetry SchoolNotes on Modernists III
DONALD DAVIE I first started reading Donald Davie, one of my own heroes, because of his odd critical book/assemblage of reviews Under Briggflatts. He did not inspire me to read Pound, not consciously, so much as to ask more questions of mainstream British poetry. I came to Pound later, and then dived into Davie on…
Ira LightmanAppy Economics
That was is a pound that i was at your house in 1 of the most famous cancer certainly the one most houston straight up in the problems the multinational global village of international capital were here to stay and everybody’s studies economics to understand economics is hard to visual i cannot allusion discount to…
Ira LightmanPound Won’t Change You
Do people read the Cantos and change their politics or their approach to economics? No, I don’t think so. Does the poetry bring that subject alive, if you are a poetry fan? Does it preach a message only poets can hear? No, I think, not really. But there are things in there. There are questions…
Ira LightmanPound and found
It’s interesting how often critics and lay people describe the Cantos as a mix of poetry and prose. Ezra Pound himself said “The problem was to get a form—something elastic enough to take the necessary material. It had to be a form that wouldn’t exclude something merely because it didn’t fit.” http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4598/the-art-of-poetry-no-5-ezra-pound But, let’s note,…
Ira LightmanAll the films from Ross Sutherland’s 30 Poems / 30 Videos residency
Ladies and gentleman he did it! Earlier this year we challenged Ross Sutherland, our 7th Digital Poet in Residence, to create 30 original poetry films in less than two months, and we’re now delighted to collect together the results of this epic, prolific enterprise. It’s been a fantastic project and wonderful working with Ross, who…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Lo and Behold – the latest
At the beginning of the year, we put out a call to poets and artists to surprise us with innovative poetry promoting ideas. Five of them did … and we were able to fund each of them with £750 to get their projects off the ground. Here’s how they’re getting on so far … …
Poetry SchoolWhat’s a digital residency? Why’s a digital residency?
The photograph above was taken at approximately 4pm on 4 March 2015, in the Waterloo branch of Foyles. The display stand – a promotion for Penguin’s new read-in-one-sitting Little Black Classics range, and but two days old – has been all but stripped bare. From a backlist containing Whitman, Keats, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Sappho, Coleridge,…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)Mixed Borders: first shoots
The project progress / plant growing analogies are proving impossible to resist when titling these reports from our Mixed Borders project. There will only be more terrible gardening double talk to come, I do apologise in advance … Since we were all matched with our gardens, the members of Mixed Borders have been paying their…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)Mixed Borders: planting the seeds
The Poetry School and the London Parks and Gardens Trust have hybridised! Between now and London Open Gardens Weekend (13-14 June 2015), seventeen poets (including two members of the Poetry School staff) will be running mini-residencies in some of the London gardens that take part in the annual LPGT scheme. There are city gardens and graveyards,…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)In Praise of Pop
From Tuesday 12 May, Kathryn Gray will be running the Summer Course ‘Alien Vs Predator?’ Poetry and Pop Culture, exploring what happens when the two apparently hostile worlds of poetry and pop culture meet … Could you write a great poem about Don Draper? Kathryn writes a few words in praise of pop: ‘In…
Poetry SchoolThe Tao of Poetry
Starting on Monday, 4 May, Liane Strauss will be running ‘The Tao of Poetry: An Introduction to the Great Poets of the T’ang and Sung Dynasties’, providing an in-depth study of the great flowering of Classical Chinese poetry and all that contributes to making it feel so contemporary. Here, Liane put together a few words…
Poetry SchoolPound uses other people
People are much more familiar with the idea of found poetry now than in any of the centuries before Pound. The idea, though, that poetry is not made up of one’s own expression but of incorporating the writings of others is an old one. In previous centuries, it was common for published writers to expect…
Ira LightmanSerif-ically Visual
To follow on from my last post and anticipate my next, I’m going to say more about how visually Pound writes/types for the page, and do so using the first example so far in my discussions of Pound using found text (more of which soon). But I’m also not going to move too far away…
Ira Lightman
Re: Drafts – ‘Lessons from Press Gang and other submissions’
Rishi Dastidar and I are working closely with The Rialto editor Michael Mackmin on a programme designed to teach us about the process and philosophy of poetry editing. Following the publication of The Rialto’s 81st issue, I met up online with Rishi to discuss how receiving poetry submissions has changed our perspective on the best…
Holly Hopkins
Notes on Modernists II
It’s obvious that analysis of other artists walks hand in hand with being an artist oneself. When you have a go at a form, then it becomes much easier to read a master’s work in that form. In an analogous way, the therapist Carl Rogers said that whenever he had an epiphany (of compassion) for…
Ira Lightman