Digital Poet In Residence Articles
Hockey, hockey
In defence of the sestina, part 2 Once in a while, for no reason at all, these lines go through my head: Call me Zamboni. Nights my job is hockey. I make the ice and watch the kids take slapshots At each other. They act like Esposito. They are the first three lines of a…
Kathryn Maris
What’s a Ghazal?
Introducing the ghazal, part 1 The ghazal is the oldest poetic form still in use. The word ‘ghazal’ is pronounced “guzzle” in some languages and “gu-ZAHL” in others, though in both with a guttural “g” almost like the “ch” in “Bach.” Supposedly, the name comes from the sound a wounded gazelle makes as it dies….
Jason Schneiderman
Everyone Hates a Sestina
In defence of the sestina, part 1 Almost every poet has heard someone dismiss sestinas. Perhaps you, yourself, have dismissed sestinas. Sam Riviere, in his review of Christopher Reid’s Six Bad Poets in The Poetry Review, wrote: ‘I dread a sestina as much as the next person,’ taking for granted the inevitability of that viewpoint….
Kathryn Maris
Meet the Digital Poet in Residence: Kathryn Maris
An Interview with Kathryn Maris
Hi Kathryn! Tell us a bit about your residency with Jason, ‘American English’. Kathryn: My blog posts will be micro-explorations of my idiosyncratic likes and dislikes in poetry, what I’ve observed, and what I wish could change. They will be essay-like in shape and are not to be taken too seriously because I regularly change…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Meet the Digital-Poet-in-Residence: Jason Schneiderman
An Interview with Jason Schneiderman
Hi Jason! Tell us a bit about the residency. Jason: I’ll be working with Kathryn to think through a number of questions about English Language poetry in the UK and America. We’ll be thinking a lot about form and community. When did you first start writing poetry? What brought you to it? Jason: I started writing…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Ain’t got no style / I’m strictly roots
Recently, I was getting acquainted with May Swenson. I saw her photo and couldn’t resist: Today, she would have a septum piercing and an undercut. A few days before I was reading Women Wearing Clothes – and the question came up: why do some girls have style and others not? On the train, I picked…
Jay Bernard
The Profit and the Loss
This is an interesting moment to be thinking about this topic. Exhibit B, at the Barbican has just been shut down. When I was seven or eight, there was a giant house somewhere in London, where my grandmother used to organise events around black history. One night, there was a display of all the implements…
Jay Bernard
1ne / 2wo / 3hree / 4our
I recently set the assignment for my Open Workshop on CAMPUS – which you should read if you have the time or an inclination towards paradoxes – and I thought it would be good to show my own workings, and how thinking about puzzles led to the skeleton of the poem I am about to…
Jay Bernard
Open Workshop: ‘It is true that this poem is false.’
After a summer hiatus, our Open Workshops series is back with an original workshop from our new Digital Poet in Residence, Jay Bernard. The thing about life is that it’s a series of mysteries, puzzles, contradictions and paradoxes – our histories, our imaginations, our relationships and our desires. In this workshop, Jay invites you to…
Poetry School
From ‘As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh’, by Susan Sontag –
This book was recommended to me and yielded good results: Artifice + Reality is an interesting description of death, as well as the cemetery. Cemetery as ideal city is fascinating – curated; everybody obedient. Time effacement — as in, making time inconspicuous? Making the memory ever present / timeless? Last words – almost always trite,…
Jay Bernard
Meet the Digital Poet in Residence: interview with Jay Bernard
An Interview with Jay Bernard
Hi Jay. Your residency is centred around an interactive poem – ‘An Untitled Text Adventure’ – that you’re going to build and document over a period of 5 weeks. Tell us more about the project. Jay: I had this idea last year and wanted to make something really ambitious in time for the WWI centenary….
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Announcing our 4th Digital Poet in Residence… Jay Bernard
We’re very excited to announce that Jay Bernard will be The Poetry School’s 4th Digital Poet in Residence, following on from previous residencees Kim Moore, Alex MacDonald and Claire Trévien. Jay’s ‘An Untitled Text Adventure’ starts this Monday 11 August 2014, in which she will write and create a prototype for an online text adventure. These grew…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
#poetwisdom
1. When writing a cover letter to a magazine, don’t compare yourself to Shakespeare. 2. At a poetry workshop, don’t say ‘It’s too late to change this poem, I’ve already sent it to the Queen’. 3. Don’t introduce yourself at a poetry residential course by saying ‘my name is Elspeth/Ivy/Agnes but you can call me…
Kim Moore
Just One Poem
When I first started writing all I wanted to do was to have one poem published. Just one, I told myself, and then I would be happy. I didn’t think beyond this because I didn’t really believe it would happen. It was the poet Jennifer Copley who told me about poetry magazines and persauded me…
Kim Moore
Logbook: ‘Dear Mr Gove today I taught the children not to sit like bags of small potatoes in their chairs’
End of year concert for one of my schools today. There were about 60 children playing trumpets, cornets and baritones, and then about twenty fifes and flutes and about ten violins. This concert is always great fun and there is usually some barely averted disaster – this is the concert where someone was once sick…
Kim Moore
Logbook: ‘I am writing this in my tent with my head torch on’
Despite being officially my day off music teaching, today is the only day I can fit in an hour lesson with an adult who comes for an hour lesson on the tuba. I really enjoy teaching this lesson because this pupil always practices – so I can actually see if the things I’ve set for…
Kim Moore
Open Workshop: ‘Putting A Poet In Your Pocket’
Hot on the heels of her ‘Show Us Your Poems’ surgery, current Digital Poet in Residence Kim Moore leads the next in our Open Workshops series… Reading other people’s poetry is vital to keep our own poems alive and breathing. In this workshop, you are going to be carrying around a poet in your pocket,…
Poetry School
A Room of One’s Own
A couple of years ago I decided to have ‘A Room of One’s Own’ tattooed on my lower right forearm. It is extremely hard to explain to people what the words mean – I found this out when I tried to tell the tattooist why I was having this particular tattoo. How to explain that…
Kim Moore
Logbook: ‘There was the time I woke up in the morning and forgot how to walk’
Conversation overheard at running club: Runner A: “Who do you get to wash your windows?” Runner B: “The rain washes my windows” Runner C: “That’s what ‘usbands are for” Runner A: “Well the rain is my ‘usband” *** After watching a documentary about death row in America.. Who would live in a house on the…
Kim Moore
Logbook: ‘My first day as Digital Poet-in-Residence is almost over’
Monday 28th April My first day as Digital Poet-in-Residence is almost over – in 30 minutes to be exact. I felt very different today – not in a turning-into-a-hologram kind of way, as some of my friends have helpfully suggested as being what will happen when I become ‘in-resident’ but in a ‘I-feel-like-a-writer’ kind of…
Kim Moore
Meet the Digital Poet in Residence: Kim Moore
An Interview with Kim Moore
What on earth do poets do all day? It’s never been easy to earn your way as a professional poet, even for the greats. Wallace Stevens sold insurance policies, T S Eliot managed checking accounts, Marianne Moore worked in a library, Maya Angelou sang in nightclubs and Robert Frost was a chicken farmer (and his earliest…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Online Q&A panel: ‘The Path to a First Collection’ with Amy Wack, Hannah Lowe, Kim Moore and Neil Astley
The path to a first collection – torturous and winding, or downhill all the way? As part of our CAMPUS Digital Open Day, we’ve put together a powerhouse panel of two poet/editor pairings – Amy Wack & Kim Moore, and Hannah Lowe & Neil Astley – who’ll be here to talk luck versus hard work,…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)This is the end
So I have come to the end of my residency at the Poetry School. It has been a lot of fun, lots of writing in the evening, lots of editing in the wee weekend hours. A great opportunity, and thanks to all of the staff at the Poetry School for being so supportive and encouraging….
Alex MacDonald
Twit Twit Twit: Charol-Annnnn Dhuffy
One of the great things about Twitter is how people can take on personalities for comic affects. There’s a fake Queen, fake Prince Charles, fake David Cameron, so why not have a fake Carol-Ann Duffy? Young_Laureate’s tweets are hilarious and weird, and have very little to do with C.A.D. (or do they?) but the idiosyncrasies…
Alex MacDonaldKeep Yes and No Unsplit: the rise of Internet translation
Last year, I was delighted to be asked by SJ Fowler to be part of his Camaradefest (a continuation of his series of events where two poets collaborate on a project) with Jack Underwood, Faber Poet and lecturer on Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College. We merged recent ideas which we were both interested in. Then,…
Alex MacDonald