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The Poetry of Parenthood

The images coming from Gaza at the moment show mutilated and dying children.  It would be tempting to say that as a parent you feel the horror more, but this is smug nonsense: people without children are just as capable of compassion.  What a parent feels is, instead, perhaps more complicated – my compassion is…

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Where do good ideas come from?

Well there’s a doozy of a question. For as long as we’ve been online, there’s been a lot of fervent chatter on the CAMPUS-sphere about where to look for ideas for new poems. Well, dear readers, if we had the magical formula we’d have already shut up shop, moved to the Bahamas and started banging…

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‘Concentrating, When One Ought Not’

I should have brought a clipboard. Note: four creases in the pillows. Note: the sides of wardrobes and desk-lamps bent back in a night not quite black enough: tough buffer-zones in a nesting-box. There are twelve bars fizzing on the surface of a clock that imply the time. Note: a touch, seeking a reach, a…

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‘Hospital Visitors’

A sharp gust of river air makes me look up, sensing some commotion at the distant end of the corridor. Wild and heedless, pressing towards me full of fathomless intent, striped by the light from high-vaulted windows, knocking soft cartilage against the walls, three mud-flecked swans smelling of tundra dip and lift their fearsome, faintly…

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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…

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A B Jackson – The Poetry of Polar Exploration

A B Jackson recorded live at The Poetry School’s Is There A Doctor In The House? PhD festival in March 2014. Read our ‘Meet the Doctors’ interview with A B here.

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Tara Bergin – Proof: a poem-film made in response to The Bloodaxe Poetry Archive

Tara Bergin recorded live at The Poetry School’s Is There A Doctor In The House? PhD festival in March 2014. Read our ‘Meet the Doctors’ interview with Tara here.

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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…

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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…

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CAMPUS Digital Open Day: join us May 7

CAMPUS – the social network for poets – is hosting its first ever Digital Open Day this Wednesday 7 May. If you’re currently a CAMPUS member or thinking about joining our community, this is best way to find out more, interact with other poets, as well as a rare opportunity to peek into our many…

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The Poetry School / Pighog Shortlist Announcement

The Poetry School and Pighog are pleased to announce the shortlist for their second annual pamphlet competition. Judges Simon Barraclough and Catherine Smith read more than 600 ten-page entries, longlisting 35 of them, and from that longlist, picked the following shortlist of 13.   Amy McCauley – Slops Fiona Cartwright – Mrs Darwin’s Egg Francine…

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How I Did It: ‘The Shipwrecked House II’

I wrote ‘The Shipwrecked House II’ at my grandmother’s funeral. I know this because this image is my contribution to her funeral book. A few weeks later I met Tom Chivers for the first time to discuss my yet untitled collection. I wanted to go with ‘Hook’ in memory of my grandmother (her maiden name)…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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