Blog
Review: Ultimatum Orangutan by Khairani Barokka
Drawing on her childhood in Indonesia and her experience as a disabled artist, Khairani Barokka’s second collection, Ultimatum Orangutan, brims with vitality, wisdom, and courage. Moving effortlessly between the personal and the universal, between hope and despair, the poet questions the spaces and times we live in, the relationship between an individual and society, and…
Jennifer Wong
Breaking into Song — War of the Beasts and the Animals by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale
What is a dead song? A silent song? A song unsung, unheard, forgotten? In ‘The Body Returns’, the concluding poem of Maria Stepanova’s powerful, playful, ferociously vital collection, War of the Beasts and the Animals, the narrator invites us to ‘Break the frozen earth, touch the dead song.’ The dead press in through the lines…
Mina Gorji
What we talk about when we talk about class / class is a slippery thing
Often, the problem of class is a hob ring, you won’t dare to put your hand on it. But it’s there all the same, in the food that we eat, in the air that we breathe, or just around the street corner where we live. Whenever I find myself trapped in a conversation so fraught…
Jennifer Wong
Childhood: A Source of Praise
I want to take you, very briefly, on a journey I made back in May 2007, to Addis Ababa where I had not been since I was a boy, some 40 years before. I had a photo of my friend Abebe in my pocket, standing with his family in our garden. My first stop was…
Chris Beckett
Poetry School Scholarships
In the 2021-22 academic year we have 2 Scholarships available for places in our three-term courses. These scholarships have been jointly funded by the Poetry School and a generous donation from one of our tutors, Wayne Holloway-Smith. One of these scholarships is to be awarded to a writer of colour and the other to a…
Poetry School
Autumn 2021 – Quick Course Guide
Our Autumn Term is now live and we’ve got a whole host of brilliant tutors and courses lined up, so be sure to book promptly to avoid disappointment. Below is our handy Quick Guide, where you’ll find everything you’ll need to know about our upcoming courses. Face-to-Face 3-TERM COURSESOur flagship weekly workshop groups where you’ll…
Poetry School
Announcing the Poetry School MA in Writing Poetry Scholarship
We’re delighted to announce the Poetry School MA in Writing Poetry Scholarship for an underrepresented poet. Poetry School is offering a full fees scholarship award (£8,100) to the Poetry School / Newcastle University MA in Writing Poetry for an outstanding applicant who is currently underrepresented in the poetry world. By underrepresented poets, we mean talented creatives who face…
Poetry School
Review – sikfan glaschu by Sean Wai Keung
Sean Wai Keung’s debut collection sikfan glaschu begins with the disclaimer that its poems ‘should not be taken as reviews – nor should the quality of the poems necessarily be seen to reflect on the quality of any food or place which may bear a similar name’. However, this generous sentiment feels a tad ironic…
Jay G Ying
The Fish in the Percolator – on Twin Peaks and Poetry
Twin Peaks may not have introduced me to the concept of mystery, but it did reinforce in me the value of mystery without easy resolution, and the power of the imagination. I’ve been thinking about how that echoes through poetry, and what we can learn from it. I watched Twin Peaks unfold for the first…
Chrissy Williams
Summer School 2021
We are delighted to welcome you to our 2021 Summer School! This programme of half-day workshops has been curated in collaboration with the exhibition A Fine Day for Seeing at Southwark Park Galleries. This show takes its title from the New York School poet Frank O’Hara, who bridged the literary and artistic worlds in the…
Poetry School
Looking at Lichens
Crusty, bearded, lobed – lichens thrive amongst us on pavements, graves and trees and are easily overlooked. Peer closely, run your fingers over a frilled edge or delicate antler – each lichen vibrantly itself in a human-centred world. Kathleen Jamie has talked of serious noticing – the idea of attention as a form of resistance….
Sarah Westcott
Review: New Poetries VIII: An Anthology
How to approach reviewing an anthology? Option 1: Dip in at random. Option 2: Read chronologically. Option 3: Begin with a poet known to you. Here’s me letting you into a not-so-big secret: I blended all three approaches when reading Carcanet’s New Poetries VIII. This handsomely designed anthology functions, on the one hand, as radar…
Jake Morris-Campbell
Review: Beethoven Variations by Ruth Padel
Many collections published over the last few years have fused poetry and biography, invoking historical, mythical, and religious characters. Poetry, in many ways, is the art of conjuring – be it specific images, emotions and speakers, or whole landscapes and decades-long sagas. These subjects, of course, can be either ‘real’ or fictional: often both; sometimes…
Kate Simpson
Review – poems for my fbi agent by Charlotte Geater
If ever I needed a distraction, it’s now. I have never needed poems more than I have this past year, as the isolating effects of the Covid-19 outbreak continue to sink in. It’s almost difficult to read Geater’s debut pamphlet poems for my fbi agent (Bad Betty Press) at this time, such is the dark…
Helen Calcutt
Ars Poetica: Cold Showers & Restless Sheets
Poetry is replete with pithy, aphoristic metaphors about what poems do. William Carlos Williams claimed a poem is ‘a machine made of words’, which Don Paterson modulated into ‘[a] poem is a little machine for remembering itself’ by way of Michael Donaghy’s poem ‘Machines’. I’ve long been interested in the desire to reduce poetry to…
Sam Buchan-Watts
Soundscapes
In the beginning, poems were songs. Sonnets were little songs. A villanelle was a dance. Does the meaning of poetry still depend, not just on the sense of words, but on their sounds? In his essay The Music of Poetry (1942), T. S. Eliot writes: We can be deeply stirred by hearing the recitation of…
Becky Varley-Winter
Places to Submit your Poetry in 2021
You’ve just completed a Poetry School course and have written and edited a few new poems, so what now? Submitting your poems to a magazine, journal, or press is the first step to sharing your work with an audience and building up a readership, which is crucial if you’re looking to publish your work in…
Esther Heller
Lyric Poetry & Poetic Lyrics
To Dig What We All Say I have a small, gold book which I bought on eBay a few years ago. It’s called Richard Goldstein’s The Poetry of Rock and it was published in 1969. It declares itself to be ‘the most comprehensive collection of great Rock lyrics ever assembled.’ A review on the inside…
Lily Blacksell
Poetry that Travels
One of my favorite things to remember are trains. Somewhere in India, top bunk, spying on my fellow passengers from above: the Chaiwala with his tiers of silver tea pots, an Assamese gamer who’d gotten on three days before me, an older couple tucking their shoes between their suitcases. Like a quick inhale, I feel…
Rebecca Levi
Caledonia Dreamin’: Exploring Scotland’s Poetry
On the cut-glass if of the day,this chancer then, already in deep,headfirst among the holly leaves – Fiona Wilson, from “A Magpie, by chance” in A Clearance (2015) The feathered creatures have a talismanic presence across the work of the contemporary Scottish poet Fiona Wilson. Birds are marvels in themselves in her poetry but there…
Richard Price
Poetry and Syntax: An Emergency Toothpick in an Imaginary Landscape
There is the anecdote of the painter Edgar Degas, observing to Mallarmé that, ‘yours is a hellish craft. I can’t manage to say what I want, and yet I’m full of ideas.’ To which Mallarmé allegedly, allegedly, replied, ‘My dear Degas, one does not make poetry with ideas, but with words.’ Poems are not ideas….
Astrid Alben
An Anthology of Poetry Beyond Semantics: Broken and Unbroken Code
What came first, the word or the poem? And which is which? Coming together from locations all over the world, from Europe, North America, and Asia, over a dozen poets plunged head-first after answers into the murky waters of experimental semiotics. Drawing on sources from runes to javascript, samurai calligraphers to occult mediums, the work…
vilde b. torset
Review: Magnolia, 木蘭 by Nina Mingya Powles
The poems in Nina Mingya Powles’s debut Magnolia, 木蘭 are stronger for the braiding of repeated threads; longing, colour, pilgrimage, and memory return often to add strength and flexibility to the lines. Even the dual and translated title is a preview of the power behind the binding of two languages on a tongue and in…
Mario Chard
A Crimson Bush Amidst Silence: Transreading Ukrainian Poetry
Going stir crazy during the pandemic? Why not take a poetic tour to Ukraine and be inspired by some of Europe’s greatest and least known writers? Some of the greatest English poetry has been inspired by other poetic traditions. T.S. Eliot powerfully imported French symbolism into English and the English sonneteers were influenced by Petrarch….
Steve Komarnyckyj
Review: Magnetic Field by Simon Armitage
Simon Armitage first referenced Marsden, West Yorkshire, in his inaugural collection Zoom! (1989). Over 30 years later, with Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems, we’re taken there once again. The poems are like cardinal directions, pointing back to the landscape and inviting readers to gather in a geographical amphitheatre. As with many poets, the childhood home…
Kate Simpson