Summer Articles
How to Improve Your Poetry: Poetry as a Revolution of Language
In this series, we interview our tutors about poetry and its place in their world. These interviews will cover creative writing tips, excelling in a poetry workshop, building a literary career, and finding your poetic voice. Here’s Rebecca Levi on poetry as a revolution of language. Rebecca is running The Poetics of Latin American Resistance:…
Rebecca Levi
Poetry for Everyone: Your First Steps into Writing
Our Poetry for Everyone workshops are designed for new poets, casual writers, and creative hobbyists who are just starting to explore the world of writing. With a focus on beginner-friendly techniques, you’ll learn the basics of poetic forms, how to experiment with different styles, and how to express your thoughts and feelings through the art…
Poetry School
Poetry for Change & Personal Growth: Writing in Crisis & Finding Your Voice
Poetry has the power to heal, resist, and transform. Whether you’re writing to navigate personal challenges, address global crises, or find an expressive outlet, our workshops provide the space, support, and expert guidance to help you craft the best poetic response. Lighting the World: Writing in Times of Crisis – Shazea Quraishi Explore how poetry…
Poetry School
Freedom in Form: Challenge Your Poetry Boundaries
Are you ready to break free from traditional structures and explore the possibilities of poetry? Our Freedom in Form workshops are designed for poets who want to experiment, challenge conventions, and embrace forms of expression. This is your chance to redefine your creative process and take bold steps in your creative practice. With a focus…
Poetry School
Unsticking a Stuck Poet: Overcoming Writer’s Block
Feeling stuck? Our Unsticking a Stuck Poet workshops are designed for writers in need of fresh inspiration. These workshops provide practical strategies, prompts, and exercises to help you get back into your writing flow. Whether you’re looking for ways to break through mental barriers or just need a little guidance to get started, these courses…
Poetry School
Food, Family & Poetry: Writing Memory Through the Senses
Ready to explore the power of memory and sensory writing? Our Food, Family & Poetry workshops are designed for poets looking to connect deeply with history, storytelling and memory, exploring how the senses shape the stories we tell. COURSES: Around the Table: Writing about Food & Family with Romalyn Ante Explore how food and family…
Poetry School
Poetry as Response: Transreading & Translating
For poets interested in translation, transreading, and poetic response, these workshops explore how poetry can be transformed, adapted, and reimagined across languages and cultures. Learn to engage with poetry in new and dynamic ways, responding to existing works with fresh interpretations. Transitions, Translations, Transformations, Transreading – Carmen Bugan Explore the interplay between reading, translation, and…
Poetry School
‘Street Sauntering’ by Suzannah V. Evans — a blog on Flâneur-ing About: The Poetry of Streets
Suzannah V. Evans explains how her new course: ‘Flâneur-ing About: The Poetry of Streets‘ will help you write poetry as you meander through cities. I have an urge to begin this blog mid-sentence, perhaps with the word ‘So’ or ‘Alors’, its French equivalent, because then I could imagine the sentence appearing suddenly out from behind…
SuzannahVE
‘Tender Towards Innocence’ by Carmen Bugan: a blog on Innocence in a Troubled World
Carmen Bugan explains how her new course: ‘A Quest for Innocence in a Troubled World‘ will help you write poetry that faces up to this worrisome time. I borrowed the title of this piece from Seamus Heaney, who has said about Czeslaw Milosz: Tender towards innocence, tough-minded when faced with brutality and injustice, Milosz could…
Carmen Bugan
What Is Revolutionary Poetics? by Mischa Foster Poole
Here is Mischa Foster Poole talking about his course Revolutionary Poetics: Writing Against the Grain; Alternate art; busting open the poem to embrace new and experimental forms. (5) This is because the tools that we have to hand are provided by the hegemonic ideology, the mode of production that seeks to ideologically reproduce itself through the…
Mischa Foster Poole
‘He Do The Police In Different Voices’ by Stephen Komarnyckyj: a blog on Alternative Histories
Stephen Komarnyckyj explains how his new course: Writing Alternative Poetic Histories will help you write poetry that faces up to this difficult moment in history I began to think about the role of poetry during what might be a global war during a Skype call with my cousin in 2022. He was in his cellar…
Steve Komarnyckyj
Kathryn Bevis – How I Did It ‘My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce’
Welcome to our Forward Prizes 2023 ‘How I Did It’ series. This year we asked the poets shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Written) to write about the inspiration behind their chosen poem. Here’s Kathryn Bevis on what inspired her to write ‘My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce.’ On…
Kathryn Bevis
Michael Pedersen – How I Did It ‘The Cat Prince’
Welcome to our Forward Prizes 2023 ‘How I Did It’ series. This year we asked the poets shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Performed) to write about the inspiration behind some of their poems from the chosen collection. Here’s Michael Pedersen on what inspired him to write ‘The Cat Prince‘. ‘The Cat…
Michael Pedersen
Jane Clarke – How I Did It ‘Pit Ponies of Glendasan’
Welcome to our Forward Prizes 2023 ‘How I Did It’ series. This year we asked the poets shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection to write about the inspiration behind some of their poems from the chosen collection. Here’s Jane Clarke on what inspired her to write A Change in the Air. On a…
Jane Clarke
Kit Fan – How I Did It ‘2047: A Hong Kong Space Odyssey’
Welcome to our Forward Prizes 2023 ‘How I Did It’ series. This year we asked the poets shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection to write about the inspiration behind some of their poems from the chosen collection. Here’s Kit on what inspired him to write The Ink Cloud Reader. My Hong Kong childhood…
Kit Fan
More love poems? Really?
‘Love’ must be one of the most overused words in the English language. So much ‘love poetry’ has been written over the course of human experience, that it might be reasonable to ask – why bother adding to the literature of love poetry? Is there anything more to say? I think there’s lots more to…
Catherine Smith
Fortnightly Feedback with Leah Umansky
It’s always a good idea to get another set of eyes on something. Sometimes, we need new ways to look at the world. The ordinary is often extraordinary; the extraordinary is sometimes ordinary. This is nothing new. The same is true for the world of a poem and a poem is really just its own…
Leah Umansky
Stanzas for Ukraine – 8
A World That Is Still Watching… by Anna Malihon. Translated from the Ukrainian by Stephen Komarnyckyj ‘Everything will start from a small country, from one that no one would have thought of’ she said ‘there will be great changes in the world, at a high price, along with blood and death. However, it will be…
Anna Malihon Stanzas for Ukraine – 7
The Poet’s Nose by Serhii Rybnytskyi, translated from the Ukrainian by Stephen Komarnyckyj With what part of the body can I reflect on matters as a poet? My nose, which for me it is practically an ‘Achilles Heel’. Any blow can knock me down, the slightest cold or drop in blood pressure clogs my nostrils….
Serhii Rybnytskyi
Snapshot on: Becky Varley-Winter’s Live Wires: Starting to Write
Our Beginner’s course ‘Live Wires: Starting to Write’ with Becky Varley-Winter recently completed another term and Becky has put together a zine to showcase the students’ best work, which you can see extracts of below. The next iteration of this course will take place in our Summer 2022 Term (running 12 May – 14 July)….
Becky Varley-Winter
Taking the Piss Flower: on the pitfalls of writing poems inspired by art, and bringing something new to the party
Ekphrasis is one of those poemy words poets assume everyone knows, like villanelle, and pantoum; but my Mac doesn’t recognise it, flags it up, and takes me to Wiki – ‘an ekphrastic poem is a poem inspired or stimulated by a work of art’. I remember feeling so happy when I first discovered the word,…
Claire Collison
The Zen of Ecopoetics: the contribution of Zen to modernist American poetry
In Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi suggests that poetry is the excess of semiotic exchange that goes beyond the limits of language and, by extension, transcends the limits of reality as we know it. In this sense, poetry offers us a way of rethinking our relationship with non-human beings and environments,…
Enaiê Mairê Azambuja
Sources of Poetic Language
Imagination, Wonder, and the Everyday The mourning doves are beginning to coo again and yesterday I saw the families of cardinals in the yew, all busy setting up. The past few days were very windy, and we found a fallen nest, the size of a basketball, along the street. It feels as if I am…
Carmen Bugan
A Slice of Butterworth-Toast: Writing Poems for Children
I think I could spot a Charles Causley children’s poem a mile away, in the dark. All of them bear a unique fingerprint of magic, music, and respect for the reader’s wish to be entertained – but it’s also true that no two Causley poems are alike. Flip through his Collected Poems for Children and…
Rachel Piercey
Writing After David Lynch – Students’ Poem
The Writing After David Lynch ten-week course took us all on a thrilling and mysterious journey across David Lynch’s films. As part of the penultimate session, on Mulholland Drive, I invited the students to respond to Naomi Watts’ staggering audition scene with a single four-line stanza, that I would then order and curate into a group poem. I took inspiration…
Chrissy Williams