Blog
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
Dark Canadee
We are pleased to share with you all the First Voyages of Dark Canadee. Dark Canadee, is a twisted poetry fantasy, set in an alternative Canada Water, and tailor-made by T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated Glyn Maxwell for the times in which we find ourselves. The project takes the form of a serial literary fiction where, each…
Poetry School
Round-up of Pamphlets by Simon, Menos, and On
The Poetry Business Competition has a great record of giving us exciting new work. These three winners – ranging from the accessible, witty, and moving poems of Emma Simon, through the powerful tale of a son’s kidney transplant in Hilary Menos’s Human Tissue to the intriguing new voice represented in Nick On’s Zhou – offer…
Jonathan Edwards
Review: Round-up of Pamphlets by Papachristodoulou, Baker, and Birnie
An interesting poetic constellation in this triad of new pamphlets; each has similarities to the others, but there are marked differences too. Elaine Baker’s Winter with Eva (V. Press) and Astra Papachristodoulou’s Stargazing (Guillemot Press) in particular are poles apart in formal and narrative strategies, and many readers may have a distinct preference for one…
Sarah Law
Dialogues in Dwelling
‘By what invisible architecture is the poem developed?’, asks Barbara Guest in her seminal, short poetic statement, called Invisible Architecture. ‘By what invisible architecture is the house turned into poetry?’, I hear myself answering as I read beyond and between the surface of her question. ‘There is an invisible architecture often supporting the surface of…
Agnieszka Studzinska
Between Translation and Creation: Getting inspired by Chinese Art and Films
Have you ever felt inspired by a film, a story, an artwork or a song from another culture, even if it feels very foreign to you? In my mind, art has the power to cross boundaries. People can appreciate a work of art through their own creative and subjective interpretations. The process of subjective interpretation…
Jennifer Wong
Poetry Beyond Semantics: Broken and Unbroken Code
What came first, the words or the poem? Put a new spin on your practice with the course Poetry Beyond Semantics: Broken and Unbroken Code – five weeks taking you from the very origins of language to the boldest poets of the present. Along the way, we will make a pit stop by some of…
vilde b. torset
Aesthetica Creative Writing Award – apply for free entry!
One of our long-term students, Tamsin Hopkins, has won the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award with a poem ‘if you’re being followed’, written on a Poetry School course. Huge congratulations for this incredible success! Tamsin has generously offered to use part of her prize to provide 10 free entries to Poetry School students, for the Aesthetica…
Poetry School
“There are still secrets to exhume”: Contemporary Gothic Poetry
In 2020, we are truly enamoured by the gothic. Many contemporary gothic-influenced mainstream titles, notably in the Young Adult category, have been transformed into successful films or TV shows with huge fan bases in recent years. There have also been many recent novel-to-screen adaptations of gothic classics – such as Frankenstein (1818), Strange Case of…
Nisha Bhakoo
Surviving the Future: Harnessing your Apocalypse Anxiety
Welcome to the Poetry Apocalypse! I first ran this course some time ago, in 2015, and as a starting point to re-working this course for 2021, I revisited the blog piece I wrote then. It started with the question ‘can you remember your first apocalypse?’, and talked about the Millennium Bug – how the fear…
Suzannah Evans
Poetry Books of the Year 2020
We are delighted to share with you our favourite poetry books of the year! Although it’s been a difficult year, where we couldn’t attend readings or poetry events in person, it has – nevertheless – been filled with exciting poetry, featuring long-awaited debut collections, innovative experiments, and fantastic books from long-established poets. There have been…
Esther Heller
Review: Solar Cruise by Claire Crowther
A poetry of the climate crisis has been growing most noticeably over the last ten years, and it is a poetry of frustration. While individual poems and sequences have done this well elsewhere, Claire Crowther’s new collection, Solar Cruise, is a brilliant complete journal of the anger felt by those of us staring the heat-death…
Patrick Davidson Roberts
Review: Pamphlets Round-Up of Dunn, Evans, and Lewis
Two presses produce introductions for three emerging poets, proving that the pamphlet form is as versatile as ever. The title poem of Roxy Dunn’s Big Sexy Lunch sets the scene for what is to follow: indulgence without guilt. ‘I advise’, Dunn writes, ‘a big sexy lunch / The six course Italian kind / Beginning with…
Jake Morris-Campbell
Review: ‘My Little Brother: a morning in heaven, at least in green’ by Christel Wiinblad
My Little Brother, the second collection of Danish poet Christel Wiinblad (but the first translated into English, by Marlene Engelund), is a moving account of Wiinblad’s brother’s life, his battle with schizophrenia, and his suicide attempt. It is also the story of her, the big sister – what she witnessed, the clues she missed, those…
Genevieve Stevens
Review: ‘Shine, Darling’ by Ella Frears
Reflections on movement and witness haunt Ella Frears’s debut, Shine, Darling. ‘I Knew Which Direction’, the prologue poem that offers a roadmap for our movement through the collection generally, also introduces the book’s metaphorical patron saint: the moon. The poem begins with its speaker on a shore, drawn to that moon ‘tilted toward the sea’…
Mario Chard
Review: ‘My Darling from the Lions’ by Rachel Long
Rachel Long’s debut collection, My Darling from the Lions, interweaves accessible narrative poems with surrealist ones to explore a mixed-race speaker’s arrival into womanhood. Five nearly identical versions of the poem ‘Open’ occur in the book’s first section. Each features an ‘I’ engaged in the same dialogue with different interlocutors: This morning he told meI…
Emily Pérez
Spring 2021 – Quick Course Guide
As you wrap yourself in your warmest scarf and woolliest sweater, you can look forward to our Spring 2021 Term here at the Poetry School! Our Spring 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…
Poetry School
The Online Museum Poet: A Job Description
The new Studio+ format is both intense and intensely wonderful: a Zoom sandwich, if you will. Or where Zoom is the bread, and Campus is the jam. It was lovely to virtually ‘meet’ the course members, before we set them tasks on our Campus group, and certainly added to the group’s dynamic. In response to…
Caleb Parkin
Review: ‘Saffron Jack’ by Rishi Dastidar
Rishi Dastidar’s second collection is a chimera. At once a long narrative poem, a one-man play with modest stage directions, and a DIY manual for How to Set Up and Rule a Nation, the book is also written in the format of a legislative document, with numbered clauses sub-dividing into indented elaborations: 24.2. It was…
Stephanie Sy-Quia
Writing ‘Heart-to-Heart’ About Political Discontent
Between the Covid-19 pandemic, the renewed concerns over racism and inequality, and the deepening of the climate crisis, our collective nerves are stretched to the limit and we are struggling to stay above water. There is no doubt that the global community is doing serious and urgent soul-searching. How can we be of help? As…
Carmen Bugan