featured Articles
21st Century Canto: Infestation-Translation
What Pound did for me is infest my poetry world. All across it, in small pockets. One reason that Pound is hard to emulate is that he has re-thought a lot of different things, and he brings all these to bear simultaneously: like all Shaun the Sheep’s friends piling into one human overcoat and walking…
Ira Lightman
21st Century Canto: Translation, Pound-style
A very good place to start with Ezra Pound is the Selected Poems and Translations edited by Richard Sieburth, originally published by New Directions, the New York publishing house founded by James Laughlin when Ezra told him “You’re never going to be any good as a poet. Why don’t you take up something useful?”. The volume is…
Ira Lightman
The blossom front: celebrating Hanami with Fawzia Kane and Louisa Hooper
On Saturday 18 April, Fawzia Kane and Louisa Hooper will be celebrating the Japanese tradition of Hanami, or ‘flower viewing’, with a blossom-fueled poetry workshop at the Brogdale Collections… Louisa: It hardly seems it, but it’s more than a quarter of a century since I sat beneath the avenue of flowering cherries by the great…
Claudia Winter (Poetry School)
‘Viciousness in the Kitchen!’ – reading Plath’s Ariel(s)
When I think of most poets, I think of individual poems. Say Auden and I think: ‘As I Walked out one Evening’, for Larkin ‘Aubade’, for Bishop ‘One Art’. I honestly couldn’t name which individual collections any of these poems were in. Say Sylvia Plath though and I, like most people, would immediately think: Ariel. It’s…
Clare Pollard
Prose Poets: ‘Of Fabulists’
One of the little squabbles I tend to have with the dictionary, is over the word Fable and its family. Although conceding that the fable has at its heart a moral, peppered through Dr Johnson’s definitions is a great suspicion of the telling. A fable is a lye and the writing of a fable is…
Helen Ivory
Announcing our MA in Writing Poetry with Newcastle University
We are delighted to announce a ground-breaking collaboration between Newcastle University and the Poetry School: a new Masters degree in Writing Poetry, leading to the award of an MA from Newcastle University*. Starting September 2015, the two year part time course will be based in two centres. You can study at the Poetry School in…
Poetry School
Meet the Digital Poet in Residence: Ira Lightman
An Interview with Ira Lightman
Find out more about Ira’s digital residency here, or join the 21st Century Canto group on CAMPUS to get all the latest updates. Hello Ira! Tell us about your upcoming residency, ‘21st Century Canto’ Ira: It’s a tie-in with a documentary I’m making on Ezra Pound, his crash and our crash, for Radio 4. One…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
‘Sound Poetry and Performance Technique’
One of my favourite things to do in the old days was to take my friends along to the experimental music and poetry night at The Klinker in Dalston, which at the time was in a pub that was then a bit grimy but nowadays is, predictably, very posh and full of people who wear hats and…
Emma Hammond Announcing our MA in Writing Poetry
We are delighted to announce a ground-breaking collaboration between Newcastle University and the Poetry School: a new Masters degree in Writing Poetry*. Starting September 2015, the two year part time course will be based in two centres. You can study at the Poetry School in London, or at Newcastle University itself via a combination of…
Poetry School
Our 8th Digital Poet in Residence is…
This March we’re inaugurating not one but two new residencies. Ross Sutherland was the first, and we’re very happy to reveal that Ira Lightman, poet and word-dabbler extraordinary, will be our 8th Digital Poet in Residence. Ira’s residency is called ’21st Century Canto’. He explains: “All my adult life I have been fascinated with The…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Re: Drafts – “Start lying about your age”, and other thoughts on biographical notes
As I write this, the latest edition of The Rialto is at the proofing stage and the last of the biographical notes are slipping in by the skin of their teeth. It feels a bit strange, having spent months getting to know poems, to now have a task focused on poets. In most cases the…
Holly Hopkins
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…
Claudia Winter (Poetry School)
Meet the Digital Poet in Residence: Ross Sutherland
An Interview with Ross Sutherland
In which Ross Sutherland answers questions about his ’30 Poems / 30 Videos’ project, the distinctions between film poetry and poetry film, and what all this writing lark is about anyway. Ross Sutherland is The Poetry School’s 7th Digital Poet in Residence. You can also read about his residency here, or join the ’30…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
How I Did It: ‘Poem in which the girl has no door on her mouth’
In Anne Carson’s essay The Gender of Sound (from Glass, Irony and God, printed as Glass and God in the UK edition, and strangely omitting The Gender of Sound altogether) she writes of ‘…the haunting garrulity of the nymph Echo (daughter of Iambe in Athenian legend) who is described by Sophokles as “the girl with…
Rebecca Perry
‘Liberating Poetic Chaos’
Sylvia Plath worked hard at her poetry throughout the 1950s. She studied, read widely and mastered a range of poetic techniques, writing hundreds of poems. Her work received awards and prizes, was published in magazines and Plath was regarded as — and regarded herself as — a ‘success’. However, by 1960, Plath had become dissatisfied…
Steve Ely
Silent Spells: poems from our Manchester Museum project
Last year, the Poetry School dispatched a group of poets, led by Helen Mort, to the Manchester Museum and let them explore its endless curiosities – whale skeletons, hunched tigers and delicate paper birds – guided by the wisdom of Anna Bunney, Curator of Public Programmes, who introduced some of the Museum’s rarest objects and…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff) CAMPUS Pamphlet: ‘Silent Spells’
Last year, the Poetry School dispatched a group of poets, led by Helen Mort, to the Manchester Museum and let them explore its endless curiosities – whale skeletons, hunched tigers and delicate paper birds – guided by the wisdom of Anna Bunney, Curator of Public Programmes, who introduced some of the Museum’s rarest objects and…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)
The first Digital Poet in Residence of 2015
We’re elated to announce that poet, writer, film-maker and human tornado, Ross Sutherland, will be our next Digital Poet in Residence. For his residency – ’30 Videos / 30 Poems’ – Ross will create thirty new films over March to April 2015, while he tours across the UK with his show Standby For Tape Backup. Each new film will be a…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Pub Chat: an interview with Shearsman Books
An Interview with Shearsman Books
In the latest of our series of feature-length interviews with independent publishers, set in our imaginary poetry theatre pub somewhere in Lambeth, we spoke to Tony Frazer of Shearsman Books… Hello there, Tony! What are you drinking? Tony: Tequila, Herradura Reposado. How long has Shearsman been running? Tony: Well, the magazine (Shearsman) started in 1981. The first pamphlets appeared…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Prose Poets: ‘Of La!’
Over there! Cries the thief, pointing away from himself and the victim as he picks a pocket. While the attention is focused on one thing at a distance, some switch is made about the victim’s person. Only later, in a moment of condensing awareness does the victim feel the change. Something about them is…
Nichola Deane
Summer 2015 courses in one line or less
LONDON – SHORT COURSES The Tao of Poetry with Liane Strauss – reviltalise your poetic practices as Liane shares her love of classical Chinese poetry with you Developing a Style with Tim Dooley – develop your own poetic voice in conversation with the best of poetic tradition Alien Vs Predator with Kathryn Gray – poetry…
Poetry School
How I Did It: ‘The Cattle Farmer’s Tale’
Imagination, being by definition un-willed, often comes in unexpectedly, the result of some chance encounter or coincidence. We can’t will ourselves into a genuinely imaginative space. We can work with what imagination provides – uncover the form, improve the syntax, work to complete the poem – but imagination itself is uncanny, unbiddable. Imagination always takes…
Maitreyabandhu
‘The Garage, Tours’
As to what’s here, I can give you some idea: Various artifacts that Grammie brought back from the Philippines – probably one box All part of life’s rich tapestry. Shoes and clothing – probably at least two large boxes or equivalent You can tell a man by his shoes. Your Dad’s…
Olivia Sprinkel
‘Globalization Detritus’
Quivering pedal steel Green-winged dove Dilapidated keyboards from an ancient Commodore 64 Hendricks and tonic with a twist Failed expectations Dinner guests arriving early Maasai warrior with 3rd gen. iPhone Heavily-marketed ISIS You Tubes Traffic oceans on the 101 North Impossible bouts of insomnia Pre-planned pregnancies Unfortunate haircuts Hammond organs Cosmologist at his wit’s end…
Jenelle D'Alessandro
Prose Poets: ‘Of Abstraction’
It’s one of the great, gratifying surprises to discover that Dr Johnson was an Objectivist. Epochs ahead of his time, he extols in his 1755 dictionary the virtues of paying attention to the world itself – the world of objects – in a manner that would surely have met with approval from William Carlos…
Dai George