featured Articles
CAMPUS Pamphlet: ‘Interventions’ by Ian Duhig
A new publication for your digital shelves, arising from our Lo and Behold! scheme. We are delighted that Ian Duhig, who worked on a L&B-funded project with Wordquake, Sewerby Hall and Bridlington Poetry Festival, is publishing Interventions as a CAMPUS pamphlet with us. Ian created a series of poetry interventions at Sewerby Hall in response…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)Festival Season: A Glimpse at our Summer School
Our Summer School is designed so that students can fit in one last blast of poetry writing before the holidays: for a whole week in July, we’ll be running a series of workshops, some for a full day, some for the morning or the afternoon, so that you can fit them in around your packing…
Poetry SchoolThe Line Break: our new, monthly poetry podcast
We’re quite thrilled to announce The Line Break, a new poetry podcast from The Poetry School. The Line Break is a free monthly podcast about writing poetry, hosted by Ryan Van Winkle and produced by Colin Fraser. For over 7 years Ryan and Colin have been providing high-quality podcasts for the Scottish Poetry Library and the…
Poetry SchoolKeep On: an Interview with Clare Shaw
An Interview with Clare Shaw
Starting on Thursday 11 June in Manchester, ‘Keep On’ will help poets at any level who are in need of a little fuel and maintenance to keep writing. We had a chat with tutor Clare Shaw about the upcoming course, and her thoughts on what to do when the poems aren’t coming … Hi Clare!…
Shane RounceEpiphanies and Other Movable Feasts: an Interview with Nichola Deane
An Interview with Nichola Deane
Part of our festival themed Summer School this July, Nichola Deane’s workshop Epiphanies and Other Movable Feasts will look at the ‘architecture of moments’ that make up our lives. We caught up with Nichola to find out more about what she has planned… Hi Nichola, tell us more about your workshop…what’s it all about? ND:…
Poetry SchoolNotes on Modernists III
DONALD DAVIE I first started reading Donald Davie, one of my own heroes, because of his odd critical book/assemblage of reviews Under Briggflatts. He did not inspire me to read Pound, not consciously, so much as to ask more questions of mainstream British poetry. I came to Pound later, and then dived into Davie on…
Ira LightmanThe Good Dark: an interview with Ryan Van Winkle
An Interview with Ryan Van Winkle
Ryan Van Winkle – poet, podcaster, Poetry School tutor, and an all round “good force” for the UK poetry scene – approached us a little while back with an intriguing and brilliantly novel idea: Would we like to be part of a ‘virtual book tour’ to help promote the release of Ryan’s second collection, The Good…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)Pound Won’t Change You
Do people read the Cantos and change their politics or their approach to economics? No, I don’t think so. Does the poetry bring that subject alive, if you are a poetry fan? Does it preach a message only poets can hear? No, I think, not really. But there are things in there. There are questions…
Ira Lightman‘The Empty House’
Open to the windswept world, Home of lost leaves And forgotten feathers. Faint whisperings of sound, Which may be mice, Or maybe smaller life, Or may be just the walls, Settling down to dust. Stagnant, still air, Turns the grime of years Into insipid icing, Distilling scents of solitude To assail the senses. Wood is…
Martin PallotPound and found
It’s interesting how often critics and lay people describe the Cantos as a mix of poetry and prose. Ezra Pound himself said “The problem was to get a form—something elastic enough to take the necessary material. It had to be a form that wouldn’t exclude something merely because it didn’t fit.” http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4598/the-art-of-poetry-no-5-ezra-pound But, let’s note,…
Ira Lightman‘Poetry Prosthetics or The Six Million Dollar Poet’
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804, and died in 1864. He wrote novels and short stories, most notably The Scarlet Letter, and The House of Seven Gables. Written in 1851, when Hawthorne was at the peak of his creative powers, The House of Seven Gables is a Gothic story about an awkward spinster named Hepzibah,…
Nasser HussainBe our next Digital Poet in Residence!
The Poetry School is delighted to invite proposals for its next Digital Poet Residency. Since 2013 we’ve run eight digital residencies on CAMPUS, on an invitation only basis. For our 9th digital residency, we’re opening out to applications directly from the CAMPUS community. The Digital Poet in Residence is an artist-led position and we actively…
Poetry SchoolAll the films from Ross Sutherland’s 30 Poems / 30 Videos residency
Ladies and gentleman he did it! Earlier this year we challenged Ross Sutherland, our 7th Digital Poet in Residence, to create 30 original poetry films in less than two months, and we’re now delighted to collect together the results of this epic, prolific enterprise. It’s been a fantastic project and wonderful working with Ross, who…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Lo and Behold – the latest
At the beginning of the year, we put out a call to poets and artists to surprise us with innovative poetry promoting ideas. Five of them did … and we were able to fund each of them with £750 to get their projects off the ground. Here’s how they’re getting on so far … …
Poetry SchoolWhat’s a digital residency? Why’s a digital residency?
The photograph above was taken at approximately 4pm on 4 March 2015, in the Waterloo branch of Foyles. The display stand – a promotion for Penguin’s new read-in-one-sitting Little Black Classics range, and but two days old – has been all but stripped bare. From a backlist containing Whitman, Keats, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Sappho, Coleridge,…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)‘The Funeral’
A card came, summoning me to a funeral. The identity of the deceased was not supplied, so I was puzzled: I couldn’t recall any friends or family members having passed away lately and my boss had been in bellowing good health when I’d left work on Friday. Still, I felt compelled to go; and so,…
Ben Rhys PalmerHow I Did It: ‘On Ninjas’
I don’t really know why I decided to write about ninjas–I knew about them in a general pop-culture way, like most people, but I hadn’t read up about or studied them in particular. I liked the fact that, as a subject, they were non-realistic, not part of everyday life. I also thought it would be…
Jane YehPoetry School One Day Workshops
…Booked your holiday yet? If your summer’s filling up and you can’t quite wangle a ten week course into your schedule, a one day workshop or evening class might fit the bill: for a short burst of poetry writing before you jet away, here are a few details of what’s on offer … Crossing the…
Poetry School‘Apple picking’
Into the midnight of an apple tree, Arms aching over a crackle of ribs, I lift my son. He twists the fruit gently And breaks the stalk, shaking the withered twigs; I stoop as a rain of ripe shadows come down And the apple drops from his opened fist. It rolls among others on the…
Mark AsquithMixed Borders: planting the seeds
The Poetry School and the London Parks and Gardens Trust have hybridised! Between now and London Open Gardens Weekend (13-14 June 2015), seventeen poets (including two members of the Poetry School staff) will be running mini-residencies in some of the London gardens that take part in the annual LPGT scheme. There are city gardens and graveyards,…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)In Praise of Pop
From Tuesday 12 May, Kathryn Gray will be running the Summer Course ‘Alien Vs Predator?’ Poetry and Pop Culture, exploring what happens when the two apparently hostile worlds of poetry and pop culture meet … Could you write a great poem about Don Draper? Kathryn writes a few words in praise of pop: ‘In…
Poetry SchoolThe Tao of Poetry
Starting on Monday, 4 May, Liane Strauss will be running ‘The Tao of Poetry: An Introduction to the Great Poets of the T’ang and Sung Dynasties’, providing an in-depth study of the great flowering of Classical Chinese poetry and all that contributes to making it feel so contemporary. Here, Liane put together a few words…
Poetry School
Love, Death, Art, Time and Nature: an interview with Sarah Corbett
An Interview with Sarah Corbett
Tell us more about your new course, ‘Love, Death, Time, Art and Nature…‘. What brought you to the subject? Sarah: I was asked to do five sessions that would appeal to students at various stages in their development, so my idea was to take five ‘themes’, and to treat each session as a unit in…
Shane RounceOpen Workshop: ‘Dear Zoo – Writing Poems about Rare and Exotic Animals’
What’s your favourite wild animal? We’ve all read poems that feature a sea bird, a house cat, a dog, a fox or a bee. Animals that share our home or our back garden. But what of those more unusual, less-popular creatures? The aardvark, the clown fish, the wombat, the penguin? The snow macaque? The lavender…
Poetry SchoolPound uses other people
People are much more familiar with the idea of found poetry now than in any of the centuries before Pound. The idea, though, that poetry is not made up of one’s own expression but of incorporating the writings of others is an old one. In previous centuries, it was common for published writers to expect…
Ira Lightman