Digital Poet In Residence Articles
Twit Twit Twit: Crispin Best
I love Crispin’s tweets. Mainly they are plays on words, puns, or subversions of famous lyrics. It is a great example of how Twitter gives an insight into a poet’s work. Crispin’s work is often presented in a fragmented way, humorous and is sometimes aware when an occasion needs capital letters. So Twitter is a…
Alex MacDonald
Internet Explorer: Is ‘Internet Poetry’ any good?
In my previous post and in my manifesto, I mentioned ‘Internet Poetry’ – but what is it? In this post, I aim to give some distinctions of what this form of poetry is, some good examples, and reasons as to why I think it is a sign of a healthy poetry scene. When I found…
Alex MacDonald Twit twit twit: Emily Berry
If anyone follows me on Twitter, they will know I am a big fan of Emily’s work since forever. Her debut Dear Boy is a wonderful book, filled with funny and sad poems that I just keep going back to read. Her Twitter feed is an immeasurable joy, and when I first started favouriting tweets…
Alex MacDonald Twit twit twit: George Szirtes
Many young poets and writers have been influenced/taught by George through his time at the University of East Anglia. Others will be more acquainted with his prize-winning book Reel and his extensive translation projects. I first came across him on Twitter, to be honest. I thoroughly enjoy his tweets about what it’s like to be…
Alex MacDonald Twit twit twit: Patricia Lockwood
The title of my residency is ‘This Twittering World’, a reference to T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton and, also, Twitter. I discovered a lot of my now favourite poets through Twitter when I joined several years ago. It also was an eye-opener into how the poetic mind works, shoring its ideas into small fragments. In this…
Alex MacDonald
Meet the Digital-Poet-in-Residence: Alex MacDonald
An Interview with Alex MacDonald
No-one gets into poetry for the fame and riches. Frankly, most poets are regarded as viewing mainstream culture with suspicion, attracted as they are to the arcane world of collecting unusually-shaped pamphlets, conjugating gerunds and seeking out clandestine spoken word evenings in the backs of run-down Japanese laundrettes. For many poets root, hog or die…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Downloading the Undergrowth
“You do worry about buying electronic goods these days, because technology evolves so fast. It’s not quite the same concern when purchasing an anvil” – Harry Hill Poetry, for many people, will be seen as an anvil – something that won’t fluctuate within the constant gallop of technology. Unlike TV, film or modern art, that…
Alex MacDonaldThis Twittering World
‘This Twittering World; or 8 Things I Don’t Necessarily Disagree with About Poetry On The Internet’ Internet as 3D Poet The Internet provides the readership of a Poet with a rounded representation of his or her life and work. Social media, which typically the Poet is fond of, allows the Poet’s Shakespearean ‘aside’ to…
Alex MacDonald
Open Workshop: ‘Hackwriting’
So far in our Open Workshop series we’ve had Oulipio-style creative upcycling with Claire Trévien, pronounless prosody from Dai George, and a reflection on the power of inheritances from Richie McCaffery. February’s Open Workshop comes courtesy of Alex MacDonald, our Digital-Poet-in-waiting, who will be offering ‘a study in uncreative writing’, inspired by his own poem…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
The end of a residency
So it is now the end of my digital residency with the Poetry School and I am having trouble concluding. It was an exciting time for me to be involved, seeing CAMPUS grow in numbers, reading the fascinating blogposts by Julia Bird, Amy Key, Nia Davis, participating in the Live Q&A’s, pushing students of the…
Claire Trevien
Poetic tourism
When I first pitched the idea for this blog post I felt very strongly about the subject of poetic tourism (i.e against it), or at least I thought I did. Concretising my thoughts has made it unfortunately clear to me that this is not as clear cut a topic as I’d hoped, and it is…
Claire Trevien
The 100 poems challenge
What is it about being a poet that makes challenges so attractive? Many questioned my sanity when, inspired by Tim Clare, I decided to take part in a challenge to write 100 poems in a day. Tim Clare is a dab hand at this, having participated in the challenge for the last five years. In the…
Claire Trevien
Reviews as a creative act
Does reviewing feed into your writing? This is one of the questions I, and other poet-reviewers, hear most frequently. Well firstly, I feel that I need to add the following disclaimer: I’ve been heavily reducing my own reviewing of late, mostly as an act of self-preservation. I reserve my reviewing energy for other magazines than…
Claire Trevien
Live Q&A with Pascale Petit and Claire Trévien: ‘Transforming Trauma into Poetry’
Poetry School co-founder, Pascale Petit, will be online this Friday (22 Nov) to discuss the topic of ‘Transforming Trauma into Poetry’. And we need your questions! Pascale is particularly interested to hear questions about her collections The Zoo Father and What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo, and her upcoming book Fauverie (due Autumn…
Poetry School
Lo-fi poetry: a best-of
In a recent interview with Helen Ivory, we discussed the new dawn of lo-fi poetry: zines that embrace their low-budgets, a preference for the hand-crafted over the sleek. Helen came up with this wonderful summary of the situation: ‘because of Kindle, books will generally become more beautiful as objects and be valued as such, rather…
Claire Trevien
The Weird Transformists
The weird transformists apply the New Weird to poetry but are not restricted to sci-fi topics. The weird transformists do not see the poem as a fixed object but one that can be manipulated in a multiplicity of ways. The weird transformists know each poem has a different way of telling the time, which might…
Claire Trevien
Meet our Digital-Poet-in-Residence: an interview with Claire Trévien
An Interview with Claire Trévien
We first discovered Claire’s work through her excellent first collection, The Shipwrecked House (recently nominated for this year’s Guardian First Book Award), a freewheeling, sea-soaked reel of a book that’s as sharp as a scrimshaw knife. Claire is also the editor of Sabotage Reviews and co-editor/creator of Verse Kraken. So, naturally, we invited Claire to…
Poetry School