Lorna Goodison and Kei Miller, Manchester, 2014
This Poets and Players event was staged as part of Manchester literature festival at the wonderful Halle St Peter’s, one of Manchester best performance spaces. There was such a big turnout, the pre-show coffee bar of choice over the road had to lock its doors.
It was somewhat of a coup to have Kei Miller here – he had just picked up the Forward prize for his 2014 collection, The Cartographer Tr...
30th September 2020
Collected poems of Anthony Burgess to be published later this year
The collected poems of writer Anthony Burgess, best known for his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, are to be published by Manchester-based Carcanet later this year.
Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) was a novelist, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. He wrote more than 60 bo...
29th September 2020
Neil Astley, Jonathan Edwards, and Karen McCarthy Woolf to judge National Poetry Competition
Neil Astley, Jonathan Edwards, and Karen McCarthy Woolf will be judging this year’s £5,000 National Poetry Competition. The deadline is 31 October. More details
29th September 2020
'Any diversion from fear, which is in itself a disease'
There will be many, many poems written about these days of great fear the world is enduring, just as there were after 9/11, and I like to think this one by Richard Levine, who lives in Brooklyn, will ...
28th September 2020
The 3-D Clock: Stephen Claughton, Dempsey & Windle
This short collection of 16 poems is an often entertaining look at an otherwise extremely painful subject that has touched, or will touch, most of our lives. It is quite a feat to write amusing poems ...
26th September 2020
'As if what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious'
It’s not at all unusual for a poet who’s been impressed by someone else’s poem to think, “I wish I’d written THAT!” I’ve never read a poem by the late Lisel Mueller — and I’ve read nearly all of them ...
23rd 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
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
'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
