featured Articles
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: 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)
‘Arkam’
This street was once a market where a raven bowed down and pecked a boy’s face. As he fainted the others came to feast. They used to steal walnuts and drop them into the road. Cars broke the shells and they ate the insides. Once they came into our house and tore into our parents’…
Tom Bland
Announcing our 5th and 6th Digital Poets in Residence!
We’re very excited to announce ‘American English’, a twisty Trans-Atlantic twin residency with Kathryn Maris (DPIR #6). Kathryn Maris, who grew up in New York and now lives in London, and Jason Schneiderman, who spent his early childhood England and now lives in Brooklyn, will compare notes on trends in UK and US poetry, discussing…
Poetry School
‘Pegged Down Square’
As you snuggle down your eyes flutter towards the beauty of REM touching your hair I whisper maybe we should move on from this cracked cold land you dream murmur I barely hear as whining winds whip like bullets through sounding walls quiet you say I delve into thought of our glitzy summer wedding so…
P A Livsey
‘No going back’
She’s made of a million white-fingered sleights of hand, light-touch lies like slight dust traces. Look, an example: a small metal cage, inside, banked-up, shredded pages of The Guardian, a scum-ringed bowl, no food, no animal. He’s hiding, she’s insisting to her school friend, with a blistering of shame. Like bonfire toffee resisting the hammer,…
Louise Ordish
‘Eye’
Always a girl’s name – you knew when she was near from the sweltering clamp of your dress on the skin between your shoulder blades and the thunder ants that flew in from the thick night to thud into the standard lamp’s hot silk shade and fall, milling in its circle of light, depositing their…
Claire Cox
Open Workshop with Richard Osmond: ‘Written in Juice of Lemon’
Content and form should always be in dialogue. In this new Open Workshop with up-and-coming poet, Richard Osmond, you’ll make this dialogue more explicit, and take it to strange new places. In this workshop you’ll be looking at poems which are designed to be published, broadcast or inscribed in unconventional ways, on unconventional surfaces or…
Poetry School
Exclusive preview: Butcher’s Dog #4
In advance of our launch this weekend at the Durham Book Festival, we present some quick cuts and choice rashers from the upcoming issue of Butcher’s Dog magazine, co-edited by Sophie F Baker (from the naughty) and The Poetry School (from the sour). It was a Herculean labour cutting almost 750 poems or so down to 20 odd, but…
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
‘Hiccups’
and fall up – Toast crumbs dance on the plate hiccups – surprising as they rise askew through bright morning light to the ceiling, spring clouds of bread midges. Beautiful. Wrong. On the table, spoons, knives jolt and jounce; pounce upright; fire high, stab plaster. Anchored in my chair, I’m braced,…
Georgi Gill
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 BernardThe Poem Noir
Watched any of these TV shows lately – The Killing, The Bridge, Luther, or Breaking Bad? Or any of the following films – The Dark Knight, Black Swan, or Drive? If you have, then chances are you’ve already come across a version of film noir. Films noir, at their most cliché, are films about ordinary…
John Challis
Performance Skills for Poets
How do you stop your knees knocking and your paper wobbling when you perform your poetry? How can you make sure they can hear you in the cheap seats? We’ve got a workshop coming up at the Poetry School with poet and performer Nick Field that will help you settle those questions. Nick writes: ‘I’m really…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)
‘Free Verse Cento’
There’s a lot at stake on a first line. For novels, the work’s mood is irrevocably set – you know when you read “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new” in Beckett’s Murphy what kind of book you’ve bought. Poetry collections are slightly different. There are multiple points of entry – I…
Alex MacDonald
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
Samuel Beckett & Poetry
It was not enough to drag her into the world, now she must play the piano. —from ‘Embers’ I remember the first times I encountered Beowulf, Auden, Hughes, Plath, and many others, but I can’t remember the first time I came across Beckett’s work. Was it on the page, in the theatre, on the radio,…
Simon Barraclough
The One and the Many: interview with Dai George
An Interview with Dai George
Hi Dai. You’re teaching a course for us this Autumn – ‘The One and the Many’. Tell us more about it. Dai: I cooked up the course as a response to some aspects of poetry that have been intriguing me for a while, to do with how we address ourselves and/or other people in any…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
‘The Secret Languages of Ireland’
Breaking camp, they left at dawn without waking a soul their wagons consigned to flames. Anna na mBreag Veronica swirled poitín against the light; cautioned me not to smash my teeth with the bottle as we swigged. As I felt her Irish tongue in my mouth, I pondered the significance of words. So the back…
Derek Littlewood
Verse Stories: interview with Catherine Smith
An Interview with Catherine Smith
Hi Catherine. You’re teaching a course this Autumn 2014 called ‘Verse Stories’. Tell us more about it. Catherine: I’ve always been drawn to narrative in my own poems – I wrote short fiction first, poetry afterwards, so it seemed a natural progression – and whilst I enjoy and admire all sorts of poetry, I feel most…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
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
‘The Day She Dropped’
the trifle, it exploded on the blue floor pain -ting cryptic signs churned in chaos. Raspberries, cream, vanilla custard, glacé cherries, perfect sponge, (home-made of course) secrets hinted by hundreds and thousands no-one would ever understand. The cold glister of broken crystal, the old bowl her ex brought back from Paris at his own risk. She…
Lydia Popowich
A Name To Conjure With: Reading ‘Mercian Hymns’
When I first started reading poetry as a teenager, poets seemed to come in three flavours. There were urbane cynics living in the fast lane or sulking in the suburbs. There were the everyday poets who were fond of anecdotes and who wandered into kitchens, started listing things and then tried to force an epiphany…
Holly Hopkins
The Fabric of Cringe … and how to avoid it.
We’re a big fan of Judy Brown’s poetry – here she is reading from her Forward shortlisted Seren collection Loudness – so we are very pleased we’ve been able to tempt her to teach for us this Autumn. Jusy is interested in getting to the nub of how to successfully incorporate details of our modern lives –…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)
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