Blog
Pound 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
21st Century Canto: Pound, Resounding
So, we have looked at the timbre of words. Sometimes one also explores a different metre (one based on length of syllable rather than stress, for example) in order to get at a good line in a good timbre. This is what we tend to do when we remember poets’ work: we remember a line….
Ira Lightman
Notes on Modernists
My initial pitch for this residency, and one that I’ve fancied for a while, is to set a number of exercises based on Modernist poets. These are some suggestions in brief. BASIL BUNTING Avoid synonyms. Try to use the plain word. If the same object appears several times in your poem, call it the…
Ira Lightman
21st Century Canto: Sounding Out Pound
I began my first week by discussing Ezra Pound and translation. I very much hope that this will lead some new readers to have a go at translating, to get past worrying whether or not they can hold a long conversation in another language before at least trying to get something from a poem in…
Ira Lightman
21st Century Canto: Infestation-Translation
What Pound did for me is infest my poetry world. All across it, in small pockets. One reason that Pound is hard to emulate is that he has re-thought a lot of different things, and he brings all these to bear simultaneously: like all Shaun the Sheep’s friends piling into one human overcoat and walking…
Ira Lightman
21st Century Canto: Translation, Pound-style
A very good place to start with Ezra Pound is the Selected Poems and Translations edited by Richard Sieburth, originally published by New Directions, the New York publishing house founded by James Laughlin when Ezra told him “You’re never going to be any good as a poet. Why don’t you take up something useful?”. The volume is…
Ira Lightman
The blossom front: celebrating Hanami with Fawzia Kane and Louisa Hooper
On Saturday 18 April, Fawzia Kane and Louisa Hooper will be celebrating the Japanese tradition of Hanami, or ‘flower viewing’, with a blossom-fueled poetry workshop at the Brogdale Collections… Louisa: It hardly seems it, but it’s more than a quarter of a century since I sat beneath the avenue of flowering cherries by the great…
Claudia Winter (Poetry School)
On teaching, writing and saying goodbye
Several of my posts for this residency have mentioned my former teachers. Now a teacher myself, I sometimes repeat or repackage their advice. If you have been in any of my classes, my teachers have effectively been your teachers too. A teacher who was particularly special to me was Roger Erickson. A celebrated English teacher,…
Kathryn Maris
Thank You, Internet
Thank you so much, everyone out there on the CAMPUS! I’ve really enjoyed being the other half of your poet-in-residence. I was thrilled to be partnered with Kathryn, and I’ve heard rumors that you may hear a bit more from us in the new year, but this post officially marks my farewell. It seems a…
Jason Schneiderman
Re: Drafts – ‘The Fall of the Wall of Hill’
The assistant editorship of The Rialto is helping me let poems take over my flat. I recently finished teaching a reading group for The Poetry School so my Wall Of Hill (entirety of Mercian Hymns photocopied and arranged on my bedroom wall so I could scribble notes) has come down. Things might have felt a…
Holly Hopkins
Where The Heart Is: Notes From A Residency with Age Concern
Being a poet in residence is normally a really fun gig. Be it a virtual or physical residency, you usually find yourself in an interesting and unfamiliar environment. You’re given protected time to write; you get to meet new people; you might get to see inside an institution or organisation that is normally closed to…
Sarah Hesketh
Queer Poetics for Non-Queers (or On Exclusivity in Identity Politics)
Queer Poetics II In my last post about queer poetics, I said, “In celebrating queer poets, I don’t think that straight poets should feel that I’m not talking to them”—but I’m not sure that I did a sufficient job of explaining what the value of “minority” poetics might be. Indeed, a wise reader called me…
Jason Schneiderman
Poetry & Multimedia I
A recent trend in UK poetry is what I might call ‘multimedia projects’ or ‘live literature,’ a development that interests me for several reasons. Like many poets, I have a love-hate relationship with poetry readings. As an audience member, I find that some readings can feel electric or even transcendent. But others can be dull,…
Kathryn Maris