featured Articles
‘A Poet’s Field Guide: Close Reading & Writing’
You’re out in the field, walking, and you see something move out of the corner of your eye. What is it? A poem? Are you sure? Can you narrow it down, what sort? How does it, well, fly? Okay, perhaps the metaphor is a little strained, but identifying a bird and knowing how to approach…
Dan EltringhamThe Poetry of Wolf Hall: an Interview with Ellen Cranitch
An Interview with Ellen Cranitch
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 10 years (not the strangest thing a poet has ever done) you’ll be aware of Wolf Hall, the literary phenomenon by Hilary Mantel, which was recently adapted into one of the most critically acclaimed TV serials in British television history. As we eagerly wait for…
Shane RounceThe New Concrete: an online reading course in attentive poetics
One of the narratives of visual poetry since the 1950s is that the form has become one that can be taken up by any poet at some stage of their writing life. The concrete movement had such a strong impact that it’s impossible not to write poetry and to consider, at some point, how these…
Chris McCabe‘The Poetry Postbox’
When I feel stuck, exhausted, fog-brained, knotted up, or like I’ll never write another poem again, I sit down and write a letter. Not as an exercise— a real letter to someone, that will be posted. I write the letter by hand, and often look around to see if I can find anything to make…
Miriam NashMondo: The Global Avant Garde
I’ve run three courses for the Poetry School so far, all of which have been about avant-garde poetry. Covering specific movements in European, British and World avant-garde writing, I’ve been able to communicate things I’m passionate about to successively erudite and enthusiastic course participants. Here’s what’s coming up for the Autumn Term… Mondo: The Global…
sjfowlerPoetry and Comics
Poetry and Comics don’t need each other to communicate, and yet Poetry Comics have been around for a while. The New York School Poets, Joe Brainard in particular, created comics which used poetic text, and the idea seems to have grown from there. In the eighties an American writer and educator called Dave Morice published…
Chrissy Williams
Saturday Sessions: an Interview with Ros Barber
An Interview with Ros Barber
We caught up with poet and novelist Ros Barber ahead of her next term of Saturday Sessions: a monthly workshop course of feedback, discussion and writing for poets… Hi Ros! Your new book, Devotion, has just been published – could you tell us more about that? It’s a novel, following up on the success of my…
Poetry SchoolDevouring and Creation: the Poetry of Food and that which Feeds our Poetry
In both his letters and his poetry, John Keats implored artists to “live unpoetically” by focusing on an “acuteness of vision”. This means listening, watching, touching and tasting what is going on around us every day. We do not isolate special occasions in order to squeeze out a poem, we are moved by something that…
rosie shepperdFinding a little STEAM space…
And another ‘Lo and Behold!’ project comes to fruition – this one’s a flicky book CAMPUS pamphlet recording the poetic conversations and collaborations between Caleb Parkin and his associates. Riled by Education Secretary Nicky Morgan’s commentary on the place of the arts in education, his group of artists and scientists started asking themselves – using…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)Poetry Studio: an Interview with Fiona Hamilton
An Interview with Fiona Hamilton
We caught up with poet and tutor Fiona Hamilton to find out more about her new course in Bristol, Poetry Studio, starting 16 September… Hi Fiona! What poetry are you reading at the moment? Today I read poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (‘Don’t Let That Horse’), Wendy Cope (‘The Uncertainty of the Poet’) and R.S. Thomas…
Poetry School‘Arachne’
See me now, a loathsome lob, mantling the May shrouding September in lurex knit; each intricate design mathematically marked with my own round cob of a body. My thread finer than any goddess’ silk, its ductile strength bears the weight of creation; my colours, luminous in sun-spectrum, silvered by moonlight. What do Athene’s dull-dyed wools…
Helen CurtisProse Poets: Of Nonplussing
Of Nonplussing – A Game of (Table) Tennis with Robert Frost and W.S. Graham Here is the table. A simple wooden table, used for writing and the occasional game of desktop table tennis, held up by trestles. Before the poets pick up their bats, I’ll rest my page on it. Here is the…
Rachael BoastCreatrix: an Interview with Claire Askew
An Interview with Claire Askew
Expectations, categorisations and loaded words: we caught up with poet and tutor Claire Askew to find out more about her Autumn Term course, ‘Creatrix: Women’s Poetries for the 21st Century’: Hi Clare! How’s your summer shaping up? Claire: Great, thanks! I’m just back from a holiday/research trip to Cornwall: I’m doing research into English witchcraft for…
Shane Rounce‘Syrup’
COMMENT Judith Taylor is a poet who lives and works in Aberdeen. “I wrote this for the last assignment in Miriam Gamble’s course ‘Peacocks & Hemlocks: the Art of Repetition’: I had tried to write about candying back in the winter, but the repetitiousness of the process was making the poem dull and I…
Judith TaylorOBJECTIVE/ MINIMAL /”ISM”
I first emerged from my obsession with Ezra Pound in the early 1990s. Then like a lot of Poundians, I went to the poets I’d heard were collected in the New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen, but not to the anthology itself; to the critical books of Marjorie Perloff, themselves full of generous chunks…
Ira LightmanRe: Drafts – ’10 Amazing Things You Will Learn Editing The Rialto!!!’
Last month saw issue 83 of The Rialto sail into the world, and with it we came to the end of our period as assistant editors. Hopefully we’ve learnt a few bits and pieces about what happens behind the scenes of a poetry magazine. Plus we have been initiated into the mystery of what other…
Rishi Dastidar
The Line Break #3 – Mary Ruefle: Get Lost
THE LINE BREAK EPISODE
Poetry School
How I Did It: ‘protest of the physical’
The long poem which makes up the centre of physical took about two years to write and then another three to sculpt into the version that exists in this collection. Around 2010 three things happened; I graduated from undergraduate study, I found out I’d got a grant to go on a free Arvon course and,…
Andrew McMillanPrimers: an Interview with Jane Commane of Nine Arches Press
An Interview with Jane Commane
The Poetry School and Nine Arches Press joined forces recently to launch Primers, a new joint mentoring and publication scheme for emerging poets. Submissions have been whizzing through the systems these last few weeks and making us very excited, so we went to have a chat with Nine Arches’ Editor Jane Commane about what she’s…
Poetry Schooltry to build a pamphlet: Transreading Central Europe
Not just new ways to write, the Poetry School’s Transreading Central Europe course was about experiments in reading. For the 10 weeks of the course, myself and other students puzzled over languages we barely understood to create poems based on the sounds or shapes of Polish, Slovene or Hungarian (homophonic translation)—which in my case had…
Rob Packer‘The Woods are Lovely, Dark and Deep: Articulating Death’
It cannot be expressed with words and it cannot be expressed without words. Wumen Huikai It is not true that death begins after life. When life stops death also stops. Gösta Ågren translated from the Finland Swedish by David McDuff I’ve found that poems ‘about death’ tend to actually be about life: about…
Beverley Nadin‘Epithalamium in Twenty Six Creatures’
The air holds highways, paths; perches firm as knowledge. Like nouns are held by verbs: windhover, hawk. The doing is the thing. A slink, a splash, a slick gleam of dark: splitting the river’s glass together, wearing the water’s name. Dog mother, dog father, chasing sun over the blue-blind snow, loping home to winter. Small…
Sally Douglas‘Elegy for Retired Crayola® Colours’
I unroll a teal-blue sky to draw the day on its awning. With nubs of wax I shape chimeras in clouds of lemon yellow and magic mint. I layer raw umber over blizzard blue, match mulberry to orange-red. I peel the paper casing from the black crayon to seal the techni-coloured page with night. I’ve…
Sarah ByrneWe’re all Doomed: Poetry and the Apocalypse
Can you remember your first apocalypse? Mine was when I was 16 and it took the form of a computer bug that was going to short the electrical supply, mess up everyone’s computer and make aeroplanes fall out of the sky. These predictions tore my attention in half – at school I was being told…
Suzannah Evans
How I Did It: ‘Crocodile’
As a child I loved the London Natural History Museum. One free afternoon in the summer of 2010, I went back nostalgically with my husband only to regret the heat and school holiday hordes. I found myself lingering in front of a case that contained rounded stones in a range of sizes, quills lacking feathers,…
Sarah Howe