featured Articles
Poetry Queries: Can Poetry Be Taught? with lisa minerva luxx
In this series, we interview our tutors about poetry queries. Here’s lisa minerva luxx discussing the idea of whether poetry can be taught.
lisa minerva luxx
How to: Feedback, Originality, & Ownership in Poetry Workshops with Matthew Caley (part 1)
Matthew Caley discusses the emotional aspect of receiving feedback.
Matthew Caley
Poetry Queries: Can Poetry Be Taught? with Giulia Ottavia Frattini
In this series, we interview our tutors about poetry queries. Here’s Giulia Ottavia Frattini discussing the idea of whether poetry can be taught.
Giulia Ottavia Frattini
Poetry Craft: My Favourite Poetic Device with Simon Barraclough
Simon Barraclough discusses his favourite poetic device.
Simon Barraclough
Poetry Queries: Can Poetry Be Taught? with Sascha Akhtar
In this series, we interview our tutors about poetry queries. Here’s Sascha Akhtar discussing the idea of whether poetry can be taught.
Sascha Akhtar
Poetry Craft: My Favourite Poetic Device with Eve Grubin
Eve Grubin discusses her favourite poetic device.
Eve Grubin
More love poems? Really?
‘Love’ must be one of the most overused words in the English language. So much ‘love poetry’ has been written over the course of human experience, that it might be reasonable to ask – why bother adding to the literature of love poetry? Is there anything more to say? I think there’s lots more to…
Catherine Smith
Stanzas for Ukraine – 7
The Poet’s Nose by Serhii Rybnytskyi, translated from the Ukrainian by Stephen Komarnyckyj With what part of the body can I reflect on matters as a poet? My nose, which for me it is practically an ‘Achilles Heel’. Any blow can knock me down, the slightest cold or drop in blood pressure clogs my nostrils….
Serhii Rybnytskyi
Poet as Archaeologist Studio Blog
This autumn, I’m thinking about what poets can learn from archaeologists and their discoveries. Poet as Archaeologist Studio will be a chance to generate new work, read and discuss poems and get feedback on your drafts. It will also be an opportunity to consider how a different discipline might inform our writing. I spent my…
Holly Hopkins
Taking the Piss Flower: on the pitfalls of writing poems inspired by art, and bringing something new to the party
Ekphrasis is one of those poemy words poets assume everyone knows, like villanelle, and pantoum; but my Mac doesn’t recognise it, flags it up, and takes me to Wiki – ‘an ekphrastic poem is a poem inspired or stimulated by a work of art’. I remember feeling so happy when I first discovered the word,…
Claire Collison
The Zen of Ecopoetics: the contribution of Zen to modernist American poetry
In Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi suggests that poetry is the excess of semiotic exchange that goes beyond the limits of language and, by extension, transcends the limits of reality as we know it. In this sense, poetry offers us a way of rethinking our relationship with non-human beings and environments,…
Enaiê Mairê Azambuja
Sources of Poetic Language
Imagination, Wonder, and the Everyday The mourning doves are beginning to coo again and yesterday I saw the families of cardinals in the yew, all busy setting up. The past few days were very windy, and we found a fallen nest, the size of a basketball, along the street. It feels as if I am…
Carmen Bugan
‘Sea Between Us’
The sea turns its beautiful face away, turns its lily-face to the sun. The sea gets cat-close, its muscles ripple under fur as it stalks off alone. In the sea-mirror waves are clouds, whale moon, spaceships polystyrene islands of debris. In the sea-mirror your hand is fairground-strange. The sea is a graffiti artist, writes huge…
Anna Kisby
How to Put on a Poetry Reading
We get a lot of messages from our students asking us how to organise a poetry reading, so we’ve gathered all of our favourite pointers and suggestions into this handy guide. Anything we’ve missed? Let us know your top gig tips in the comments. First Find Your Venue · How many people do you want to invite to…
Andrew Parkes (Poetry School)
Poetry School / Poetry in Aldeburgh Paid Residency Opportunity!
Get your buckets and spades, bikinis and biros ready – here’s news of a paid poetry residency by the beach! The Poetry School and Poetry in Aldeburgh have a joint offer to make: an opportunity for a festival-focused poet in residence. While the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival organised by The Poetry Trust has a breather and…
Poetry School
The Bloodjet: An Interview with Katrina Naomi
An Interview with Katrina Naomi
“I think the main thing for me is if you’re going to write about violence, do it well. Let us smell it, taste it.”
Ali Lewis
Poetry School Summer Term Launch Reading
We’re launching all the new Summer courses and workshops, and celebrating the work of our students and tutors at our Summer Term Launch Reading, this Friday 22nd April. At this free event at the Tea House Theatre, Vauxhall, we’ll have two Summer Term tutors reading: Catherine Smith and R.A. Villanueva, plus we’ll hear the work of…
Ali Lewis
Announcing our Digital Open Day 2016
Impressive announcement klaxon! Yes, that’s right – don your party capes and matching booties as we’re having another Digital Open Day this 5 May 2016. In the next couple of weeks we will be throwing off our winter clothes and unveiling our new look web platform, bringing together our two existing sites – thepoetryschool.com and…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
How to Collaborate with Yourself
One of my favourite comics is Robot Hugs’ Identity Shift. It’s addressed to folk exploring gender and sexuality, reassuring them about the anxieties that come when identity shifts and changes over time, but it makes a broader and stranger point: that all of us present ourselves as different people in different places. The face we…
Harry Josephine Giles
Making Birds: an Interview with R.A. Villanueva
An Interview with R.A. Villanueva
R.A. Villanueva is an award-winning Filipino-American poet and founding editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art. His first collection, Reliquaria, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and new writing appears in Poetry, Prac Crit and widely elsewhere. Now living in the UK, Ron’ll be teaching the Summer Term course Making Birds: New Poetic…
Ali Lewis
Open Workshop: ‘Storms in Teacups’
Entropy is the inclination of all matter to tend towards disorder. The fact that we are able to lead lives with any semblance of structure or routine is a miracle. Yet even within the most controlled and well-practiced everyday acts, there is a propensity towards chaos, a possibility of total loss of control. In this…
Poetry School Our Summer School Programme 2016
Summer’s here and the time is right for getting a burst of varied and exciting poetic inspiration. Once again, this Summer we’ll be running a week of workshops during the day to get you warmed up and inspired for some patio, beach or park-based reading and writing. We’ve asked some of our favourite poets to…
Ali Lewis
The Line Break #10 – Paula Meehan: People Make The Songs
THE LINE BREAK
Poetry School
Open Workshop: ‘Reduce/Reuse/Recycle’
According to T.S. Eliot, mature poets steal where immature poets borrow. Stealing, here, doesn’t mean copying: rather, it means turning what you take from another writer ‘into something better, or at least something different’. It’s an appealing idea, but does it work? In this Open Workshop with Adam Crothers, we will think about how to…
Poetry School
‘The Have the Want and the Next’
This week I’ve talked about how, by and large, we in the UK are free to express ourselves as we wish, within certain broad boundaries defined by hate speech legislation, defamation law and so on. Wonderful though this may be for many of us, some UK citizens are actually denied this right. They are people…
Shey Hargreaves