Project celebrates Worcester-Ledbury line's link with Dymock poets
Ledbury poetry festival and West Midlands Railway are celebrating the poetic heritage of a railway line, from Worcester Shrub Hill to Ledbury, and its association with the Dymock poets, including Robert Frost and Edward Thomas.
The Poetry on Platforms website says: “From the group of young poets and their families who visited each other in a little village called Dymock in the months before the...
30th November 2021
Rebels who won applause: Lemn Sissay on the dissidents of poetry
Poet Lemn Sissay features the Liverpool Poets in the first episode of a radio series titled Poetry Rebels on Friday 3 December. He looks at how Roger McGough and Brian Patten pushed aside the poetry establishment and started performing live in bars and clubs in the 1960s, making a direct connection ...
30th November 2021
Manchester Cathedral hands out £100 prizes to 10 winners
Manchester Cathedral has announced 10 winners of its 600th anniversary poetry competition, who will all receive £100 each. The winning poems are: ‘Fourteen Angels’ by Jane Burn; ‘Margaret Beaufort’s A...
30th November 2021
Facing the music with Luke Wright's band at Mother Wolf Club
Luke Wright will be headlining The Mother Wolf Club’s Christmas special event on 10 December at The Macbeth in Hoxton, east London, along with eight other feature artists including Luke's new band Peo...
30th November 2021
Learning to love the sonnet and other skills: Poetry School’s MA students celebrate with rite of passage night
Sue Johns began writing and performing some years ago as a ‘punk poet’ and is veteran of the London circuit. She has published a number of poetry collections, and yet still feels she has something to ...
25th November 2021
Wagtails, puppets, pogroms: Roma women poets find their voices
“Oke Romano ceriklo! Dikasa kalen! Behold a wagtail, and you shall see Gypsies!” These are the final words of editor Jo Clement’s preface to Wagtail, the Roma Women’s poetry anthology, that was launch...
23rd November 2021
Antrobus, Chingonyi, Kennefick, and Lowe shortlisted for Costa poetry award
Raymond Antrobus, Kayo Chingonyi, Victoria Kennefick, and Hannah Lowe have been shortlisted for the Costa poetry award, it was announced on Tuesday night. All four poets have also been shortlisted for...
23rd November 2021
'I need you like the earth needed the flood after dearth'
There is a bit of slapstick comedy in this poem of conundrums. In 'Multiple Man: Guest-starring me & You', Gary Jackson knows that he is playing a game with perception — is the “you” himself or someon...
22nd November 2021
Fireworks and fiery words at Spoaken Word in Lewes
It’s hard to beat Janine Booth as an experienced organiser and MC. The Marxist, trade unionist and socialist-feminist has been around as a poet since the 1980s, when she was one of the ranters who bra...
22nd November 2021
Never mind the rugby, the planes, or even the literature festival: grassroots voices put Richmond upon Thames on the poetry map
To be fair, the rugby fans didn’t turn a hair when they encountered a group of poets beside the river Thames in Richmond while they were heading from the pub to nearby Twickenham. On the other hand, t...
21st November 2021
Deadline nears for Wales Poetry Award
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch will be judging the £500 Wales Poetry Award, run by Poetry Wales magazine. The competition is free to enter for writers of low-income backgrounds living in the UK. The deadli...
19th November 2021
'If I fell I would fall in state-shaped flakes. One for every place my body lingered'
Sometimes 'dream poems' give an account of the strange revelations of our subconscious, and sometimes, like here, the 'dream poem' is the poem of wishes and hope, expressing a fantasy of a certain lon...
19th November 2021
'Welcome to Tottenham': Foyle Young Poets winner featured on TV
A Foyle Young Poets award winner was featured on BBC TV’s London news programme on Tuesday reciting his hard-hitting poem ‘Welcome to Tottenham’. Seventeen-year-old Giovanni Rose’s poem includes lines...
17th November 2021
Can a robot write poetry? Ai-Da responds to Dante
A creative robot named Ai-Da is to appear at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum on Friday 26 November to give three public performances of poems she has written using her artificial intelligence, in response t...
16th November 2021
'Fail them, and I will rise': Kathleen Jamie's poem after COP26
Scotland’s new makar Kathleen Jamie has written a poem to mark the end of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. Titled ‘What the Clyde said, after COP26’, it refers to the river’s industrial herita...
16th November 2021
All the Men I Never Married: Kim Moore, Seren
This remarkable and very readable book about “a gallery of exes and significant others” first emerged from academia. In an interview earlier this year Kim Moore explained that the poems in her second ...
16th November 2021
Outbreak of 'cancel culture' on the Write Out Loud Gig Guide?
We’re sure you’ve noticed that we have an expanded Write Out Loud Gig Guide on our home page again, which includes online and in-person events. You may also have noticed that a few of them are marked ...
15th November 2021
When Little Amal met Louise the poet in Wigan ...
Little Amal – the not so little puppet of a nine-year-old Syrian girl who has been walking 5,000 miles from Turkey to the UK to raise awareness of the difficulties faced by child refugees - was greete...
14th November 2021
Bloody Amazing: ed. by Gill Lambert, Rebecca Bilkau, Dragon Yaffle
This is a comprehensive, really ‘amazing’ anthology of poems about periods, examining in depth all aspects of menstruation and its effect on the female body and mind. It is a woman’s world from which ...
14th November 2021
'I will miss you, armadillos and ... tarantulas crossing the road in the dark'
There is a certain delightfulness in the rhythm and play of ‘Moving to Santa Fe’ by Mary Morris, in which she enacts the farewell song of someone moving from an old home to a new one. In Morris’ case,...
13th November 2021
Red Letter Openings, 40th anniversary anthology, Open University Poets
This is special all right; 40 years and still going with a wide range of styles. You can tell it has been put together by clever Open University students because it can be roughly split using the prin...
9th November 2021
John Agard is first poet to win children's literature award
The Afro-Guyanese writer John Agard has become the first poet to receive the BookTrust lifetime achievement award, which is intended to celebrate the work of an author or illustrator who has made an o...
9th November 2021
No more odd odes: farewell to The Archers poet in residence
Write Out Loud is sorry to hear of the death of Bert Fry, a character from the long-running Radio 4 serial The Archers, who had become in recent years the show’s unofficial poet in residence. Bert spe...
6th November 2021
Snow like Silk around my Soul: Liv Johannesson
Sincerity and openness characterise Liv Johannesson’s first collection. She first published her work on Instagram and was supported by her followers and also by the Greenwich Writers’ Group. Friends a...
6th November 2021
Young poets perform prize-winning climate poems at COP26
Young poets from the Poetry Society’s Young Poets Network were invited to respond to Sir David Attenborough’s speech at the opening of COP26 in Glasgow. Inspired by Sir David’s words calling world lea...
6th November 2021
Simon Armitage's Stanza Stones poems seen in new light - and at new locations
Ilkley literature festival has joined forces with the poet laureate Simon Armitage to revisit the Stanza Stones collaboration as part of the ‘Bradford is LiT’ celebrations of light taking place at the...
6th November 2021
'She says she wants to be a queen in her own right'
Humour in poetry does not always soften the blow secreted within a poem. Michelle Peñaloza knows that a tiny grenade sits in the middle of ‘Doppelgänger’, a seemingly passing comment, but one full of...
6th November 2021
When Sir Paul McCartney met Paul Muldoon: former Beatle and poet discuss the song lyrics
Sir Paul McCartney appeared at the Royal Festival Hall on Friday night as part of the Southbank Centre’s London literature festival, a celebration of poetry and lyricism. He was discussing his song ly...
6th November 2021
Luke Kennard's 'Notes on the Sonnets' wins £10,000 Forward prize
Luke Kennard has won this year’s £10,000 Forward prize for best collection for Notes on the Sonnets (Penned in the Margins), a collection of responses to Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, which he described ...
6th November 2021
'I didn't want it to be too clever': satirist Armando Iannucci's mock-heroic poem about pandemic
Satirist Armanda Iannucci has published a mock-heroic poem called Pandemonium about the Covid pandemic, in the style of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Talking on the BBC’s Front Row Radio 4 programme, Iannuc...
5th November 2021
New plea to help save William Blake's cottage in Sussex
The 17th-century thatched cottage in Sussex where the visionary poet and painter William Blake wrote the words to Jerusalem, is at risk of being lost because of decay, Historic England has said.
Bl...
4th November 2021
Call and Response: collated by Amanda Bonnick, Black Pear Press
This attractive pamphlet of 23 poems by 17 poets has been collated by Amanda Bonnick, Worcester Cathedral’s first poet-in-residence, following a call for submissions from local poets to send in poems ...
2nd November 2021
Poets for the Planet at UN climate change conference in Glasgow
The environmental poetry group Poets for the Planet, made up of award-winning poets and spoken word artists from around the world, appeared with researchers from Imperial College London at the COP26 G...
2nd November 2021
