poem Articles
A “Cento Sonnet” written by Mary Dickins on Jacqueline Saphra’s ‘Creative Constraint’.
We are delighted to be publishing this piece of poetry collage, from the Autumn 2023 term of Jacqueline Saphra’s course Creative Constraint. In a group exercise this term, each of Jacqueline’s fourteen students shared one line of a sonnet to develop for homework. Mary has then fashioned all of these one line prompts into a…
Poetry School
Stanzas for Ukraine – 25
The Heat by Fedir Mlynchenko, translated from the Ukrainian by Stephen Komarnyckyj My flight from the war, launched by Moscow against Ukraine, is similar to the stories of millions of other forced exiles. It’s still too painful to even think about and especially to share my recollections.Despite having traversed thousands of kilometres, I still couldn’t…
Fedir Mlynchenko
The Online Museum Poet: A Job Description
The new Studio+ format is both intense and intensely wonderful: a Zoom sandwich, if you will. Or where Zoom is the bread, and Campus is the jam. It was lovely to virtually ‘meet’ the course members, before we set them tasks on our Campus group, and certainly added to the group’s dynamic. In response to…
Caleb Parkin
Review: ‘Letters Home’ by Jennifer Wong
‘Home’ is a contentious word. Both personal and political, ‘home’ implies belonging, and not belonging. In Robert Frost’s ‘Death of the Hired Man’, ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in’. But is that place where we live, where we were born, where our family…
Heidi Williamson
Primers Announcement!
The manuscripts are dog-eared and the Judges dog-tired, but we are now delighted to be able to make the final Judges’ announcement in our Primers publishing and mentoring scheme. From the origianal submissions of about 350 poets, the four writers who we are going to take forward to publication with Nine Arches Press are ……
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)‘Playing Your Guitar’
Because my stairwell still creaks with your step and your door snaps shut and your cold must swells the air that trips my every breath. Because I wallow in the contradictions of grief, where you stood, you stand, where you cannot be. Because heaven gives hell a shell loss cracks in absolutions or conceits, I…
Sophia GalifianakisMondo: 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…
sjfowler
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 shepperdPoetry 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‘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 Taylor‘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‘The Yeti’
I met the Yeti in Tibet. In the Lhakpa La, by the Rongbuk glacier, northeast of Everest, we met. I: [the ice in my eyes] … Dad? And, he: [doing seemingly nothing but shuffling around in the snow] He was, I knew, founded on grains of truth. Host to his parasites, scalp to hallux, hair…
Jeremy Noel-Tod