'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
Poetry in the time of coronavirus. Many copies of Write Out Loud’s Beyond the Storm poetry competition anthology have been mailed out over the last fe...
20th Sep 2020 10:55 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
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
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
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
Neil Astley, Jonathan Edwards, and Karen McCarthy Woolf will be judging this year’s £5,000 National Poetry Competition. The deadline is 31 October. Mo...
15th Aug 2020 6:32 am
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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