'A poetic Pepysian diary': veteran performer Nick Toczek has written a daily Covid poem during the pandemic
In mid-March veteran performance poet Nick Toczek started writing a poem a day about the pandemic – and he’s still writing them. He has already published one book of his poetic Pepysian diary of our modern-day plague, and another is in the pipeline. In an interview with Write Out Loud he talks about how his ‘normal’ life changed with lockdown; why he felt impelled to write a pandemic poem a day – and how he manages to do it; a...
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News and Opinion
The countdown has started for National Poetry Day on Thursday 1 October, which will be quite different this year because of lockdown restrictions. The...
21st Sep 2020 4:48 pm
Poetry in the time of coronavirus. Many copies of Write Out Loud’s Beyond the Storm poetry competition anthology have now been mailed out - and thank...
21st Sep 2020 10:56 am
Last year’s popular Places of Poetry project, in which poets were able to post their poems on a map of England and Wales, is being revived for a few d...
14th Sep 2020 10:08 am
A poetry drive-in is due to take place on Sunday 11 October at Kenwood Hall hotel, Sheffield, when the poet laureate Simon Armitage will read live for...
20th Sep 2020 8:05 pm
The American-British poet Anne Stevenson has died at the age of 87 at her home in Durham following a short illness. Saying it was “deeply saddened” to...
14th Sep 2020 12:00 am
Write Out Loud’s poetry competition may have finished, but there is still plenty of scope for writing Covid-19 poems. In South Yorkshire they have bee...
9th Sep 2020 1:59 pm
During the coronavirus shutdown Write Out Loud has been looking back at some wonderful live poetry moments over the last few years … and re-running so...
20th Sep 2020 8:17 pm
It was a day when the anecdotes just kept on coming. Allen Ginsberg was “very, very drunk, and quite angry that he had been kept waiting for so long” ...
20th Sep 2020 8:18 pm
An exam body has quietly – or, maybe, not so quietly – reinstated poetry as a compulsory topic in its GCSE English literature exam next year. There wa...
20th Sep 2020 12:32 pm
Mark Doty and Mona Arshi will be judging the £2,000 Troubadour international poetry prize. The deadline is 28 September. More details
18th Sep 2020 8:01 pm
We’re entering a new kind of autumn. This one arrives after months and months when everything was new and strange, and offered very little but bad new...
14th Sep 2020 12:00 am
Novelist and poet Katherine Stansfield grew up in Cornwall and now lives in Cardiff. She teaches for the Open University and is a Royal Literary Fund ...
19th Sep 2020 12:00 am
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