Countdown starts for a different kind of National Poetry Day this year
The countdown has started for National Poetry Day on Thursday 1 October, which will be quite different this year because of lockdown restrictions. The National Poetry Day organisation is inviting everyone to celebrate on the big day by sharing a poem with friends, family and neighbours, online and in the places they live and work. They hope that hundreds of mini-events, including bubble-friendly #...
21st September 2020
Our anthology for an uncertain, unsettling, painful, frightening, uplifting time
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 thanks for your enthusaistic reponses to receiving them! We have already publicised the six poems that our judge Andrew McMillan picked out, which became ...
21st September 2020
International Poetry Reincarnation, London, 2015
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” when he finally got up to perform at the first Int...
20th September 2020
Write Out Loud relives some memorable live poetry moments
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 some of our favourite reviews to refresh memories, a...
20th September 2020
Sonnets and bonnets: Simon Armitage to appear at drive-in poetry reading
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 an audience socially distanced in their cars. Adv...
20th September 2020
Poetry: compulsory or optional at next year's GCSE exam? That is the question
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 was an outcry last month – in the poetry world, at a...
20th September 2020
We Could Be Anywhere By Now: Katherine Stansfield, Seren
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 Fellow.
The poems in We Could Be Anywhere By No...
19th September 2020
Deadline nears for Mark Doty and Mona Arshi to judge £2,000 Troubadour prize
Mark Doty and Mona Arshi will be judging the £2,000 Troubadour international poetry prize. The deadline is 28 September. More details
18th September 2020
'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 m...
14th September 2020
Places of Poetry map for posting poems to be reopened for a few days next month
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 days from the start of next month.
In 2019 poets...
14th September 2020
'All those flashy spikes waving in the wind, conducting summer’s final notes'
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 news for the future. All spring and summer parents wo...
14th September 2020
Anne Stevenson, poet and biographer of Sylvia Plath, dies aged 87
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 announced her death, her publisher Bloodaxe said ...
14th September 2020
Lockdown limbo: poetry and music band Bard Company launch book after cancelled gigs
Two organisers of regular Write Out Loud Nights – Ian Whiteley (Wigan) and Jeff Dawson, aka Jeffarama! (Bolton) – have teamed up with fellow members of their Bard Company poetry and music band to prod...
12th September 2020
Wild Persistence: Katrina Naomi, Seren
Prize-winning poet, translator and critic Katrina Naomi is the author of two previous full-length collections of poetry and four poetry pamphlets. She has a PhD in creative writing from Goldsmiths an...
12th September 2020
George the Poet, London, 2014
I missed George the Poet at Latitude after he sent word that he was stuck on a train. On Wednesday night at Out-Spoken in the heart of Camden there came a message that he was delayed in south London....
11th September 2020
Still need to write more Covid poems? Here are some poetry videos that may help to inspire you
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 been running Hear My Voice 2020, a competition open t...
9th September 2020
'You say you see in me a strength that strengthens you'
I like poems that rhyme so smoothly and inconspicuously that when you get to the end and look back you’re surprised to discover that you’ve just read a sonnet, this one by Eleanor Channell, who lives ...
9th September 2020
Refugee poet and translator George Szirtes named as Booker prize judge
A poet and translator who came to Britain as a refugee at the age of eight after the Hungarian uprising in 1956 has been named as one of the 2021 International Booker prize judges.
George Szirtes, ...
8th September 2020
Emma Purshouse gets the lockdown lowdown on Black Country dialect poetry on BBC Radio 4
Writer and performance poet Emma Purshouse explored the Black Country and its poetry on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday 6 September, investigating why contemporary writers in the region are still using dialect ...
6th September 2020
Thousands back petition over 'grave concerns' for future of National Poetry Library
More than 6,000 people have already signed a petition expressing “grave concerns” about the future of the National Poetry Library at London’s Southbank Centre. The petition points out that imminent jo...
6th September 2020
Afternoon Music: Tom Harding, Palewell Press
This review copy landed on my doormat, and within a few minutes I was deep in it, reading one poem after another, unable to put it down. This doesn’t happen to me as often as perhaps it should.
Aft...
6th September 2020
'A Bradford millionaire': line from The Waste Land is clue to £20,000 donation
A line from TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land has provided a bizarre clue to a £20,000 donation from the poet’s estate to the Brontë Parsonage, the BBC has reported. The Covid-19 pandemic has put the mus...
6th September 2020
Roger McGough, London, 2014
Roger McGough has any number of very funny poems. As he explained at his reading at the Troubadour in London on Monday night, ‘Mermaid and Chips’ is “about pubescent longing – but mainly about chips”...
2nd September 2020
Rave On, John Donne: Ireland's poet-president Michael D Higgins delivers tribute to song's writer Van Morrison
The president of Ireland, and poet, Michael D Higgins, has performed ‘Rave On, John Donne’ as part of a tribute by the magazine Hot Press to the poem/song’s writer, Van Morrison, to mark the 75th birt...
2nd September 2020
