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Mixed 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‘Communications Breakdown’
I was posting a letter to my mother to thank her for all the fish when I heard a woman’s voice. It seemed to be coming from the letterbox itself. ‘Get me out!’ it shouted. I looked around but there was no one there. Just me, the post box, the grassy verge. A cloudless sky….
Alexandra EnglishSerif-ically Visual
To follow on from my last post and anticipate my next, I’m going to say more about how visually Pound writes/types for the page, and do so using the first example so far in my discussions of Pound using found text (more of which soon). But I’m also not going to move too far away…
Ira Lightman‘Five-Stars’
Nothing’s too much trouble for our stellar host – he bellows loud hellos from his front door before our car-bound feet disrupt his gravel. Call-me-Toby ushers us to his spongey lemon couch for a slice of just-baked drizzling lemon sponge cake. He plunges into freshly brewed fairly-traded coffee, pours into bone-china, places onto Badger’s Bottom…
Jill MunroProse Poets: ‘Of Gears’
I like poems that change gears, or change gear, if you prefer. I also like songs that change gear, like ‘I Heard Ramona Sing’ by Frank Black, which gives the gearbox a good work out before settling into the first verse. It seems to rev through four or five intros before finding its optimal…
Simon Barraclough‘The Act of Transformation’
It was only by chance I started reading it at all. A good friend of mine, the poet David Tait moved to China a couple of years ago and asked me if I would look after some of his poetry books. I picked them up in a large purple suitcase that now sits in my…
Kim Moore‘Camouflaged Beasts’
What you thought were autumn leaves herded against curb, spattered with bird shite, is an oil-slicked kitten that won’t be licked clean but continues to wander from the litter, tumble into a ditch and climb free, curious as sticking a fork in a socket, but camouflaged from predators like an owl feathered in sunflower yellow…
Charles Lauder Jr‘Andromeda Unchained’
A day after the accident on my twentieth birthday I’m told I’ll never see him again. Stretched on a narrow bed, with my leg fractured in four places and braced neck, I clutch the hospital bill. That night I dream there are snakes in our garden. Six gunmetal-silver, eight-foot boa constrictors slink towards the glass…
Vasiliki AlbedoChemical Poetry: an interview with Simon Barraclough
An Interview with Simon Barraclough
‘Chemical Poetry: The Periodic Table & Poetry‘ will use the famous periodic table of elements as a springboard and playground for new writing. Fizz, explode, react and toxicate: we spoke to Simon Barraclough about what happens when poetry and chemistry meet. Hi Simon! What’s ‘Philandrium’? SB: Philandrium is a brand new element discovered and analysed…
Poetry SchoolOpen Workshop: ‘Make New & Mend’
What makes a poetic image stay with you? It’s hard to remember an entire poem by heart, but often, a particular image will stick in the mind for days, months, even years after reading. In our latest Open Workshop, Claire Askew will challenge you to create imagery that is unforgettable. You’ll take a common poetic theme…
Poetry School
Re: Drafts – ‘Lessons from Press Gang and other submissions’
Rishi Dastidar and I are working closely with The Rialto editor Michael Mackmin on a programme designed to teach us about the process and philosophy of poetry editing. Following the publication of The Rialto’s 81st issue, I met up online with Rishi to discuss how receiving poetry submissions has changed our perspective on the best…
Holly Hopkins
Nightwriter: an interview with Tom Chivers
An Interview with Tom Chivers
Hi Tom – your new online course, Nightwriter, is a nocturnal writing course (our very first). What can we expect? And what happens to your poetry brain after dark? Tom: Writing poetry is about making choices. Selecting what to say and what to leave unspoken. I am interested in erasure, the occult, in things unsaid,…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Lo and Behold! – the first report
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… Alistair Cartwright /…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)
Mixed Borders Poetry Residencies: an interview with Sarah Hesketh
An Interview with Sarah Hesketh
‘Mixed Borders: Poets in Residence in London Gardens‘, a Poetry School Summer workshop with London Parks and Gardens Trust, will see poets paired up with allotments, garden squares and hidden spaces to propagate their own green and leafy poetry ideas. We had a chat with Sarah Hesketh, poet and Event Manager for London Open Garden…
Claudia Winter (Poetry School)
GOLDEN RATIONALITY
I’ve been asked to write a manifesto. This doesn’t suit the person I now am, but I did write one 20 years ago (it was published in an anthology of manifestos, Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh, Manifestos and Unmanifestos, edited by Rupert Loydell) and I have never really explained or qualified it. So perhaps I…
Ira Lightman
‘The Poet as Curator, the Curator as Poet’
A curator [from the Latin curare – to take care of] selects and organizes the items in a collection or exhibition. In creating a poem, we can follow a similar process, selecting found text and juxtaposing it with new writing to spark fresh meanings and revelations. Anne Carson has been described as ‘the…
Shazea Quraishi
Notes on Modernists II
It’s obvious that analysis of other artists walks hand in hand with being an artist oneself. When you have a go at a form, then it becomes much easier to read a master’s work in that form. In an analogous way, the therapist Carl Rogers said that whenever he had an epiphany (of compassion) for…
Ira Lightman
21st Century Canto: Pound, Resounding
So, we have looked at the timbre of words. Sometimes one also explores a different metre (one based on length of syllable rather than stress, for example) in order to get at a good line in a good timbre. This is what we tend to do when we remember poets’ work: we remember a line….
Ira Lightman
21st Century Canto: Sounding Out Pound
I began my first week by discussing Ezra Pound and translation. I very much hope that this will lead some new readers to have a go at translating, to get past worrying whether or not they can hold a long conversation in another language before at least trying to get something from a poem in…
Ira Lightman
Playing with History: an interview with Kelley Swain
An Interview with Kelley Swain
Hi Kelley! Could you tell us about your Summer School workshop, ‘Playing with History: Using the Past in Poetry’ – what can we expect? Kelley: “Playing with History” is going to be a full-day workshop, starting at 10:30 and running until 4:30 in the afternoon, with a lunch break. I’m going to start by talking…
Claudia Winter (Poetry School)