Call of the wild ... enter poetry festival's £200 competition
Ben Ray, pictured, and Cheltenham poetry festival founder Anna Saunders will be judging entries for the festival’s £200 Wild! Poem competition. Entries should be “as unruly and untamed as you like” to match the festival’s Wild theme. The deadline is 29 February. More details
31st January 2020
Middle of the road poetry? Walking poet Lucy Furlong gets down to the grassroots
An eco-poet has found a new path to creativity – by writing about the nature to be found on a section of central reservation on a dual carriageway. Lucy Furlong’s chapbook Sward includes a look in great detail at the plants – and rubbish – in the middle of the A240 Kingston Road, from the Tolworth ...
31st January 2020
Write Out Loud Woking at the Lightbox tonight
It's the first Write Out Loud Woking of 2020 on Thursday 30 January at the LIghtbox art gallery in Woking. Sign up for the open mic, hosted by Greg Freeman and Rodney Wood, from 7.30pm. Entry is free ...
30th January 2020
Artlyst's £1,000 prize for a poem based on work of art
The art information website Artlyst, in association with the Poetry Society, have launched an international award for poetry based on works of art. The Artlyst Art to Poetry award celebrates ekphrasti...
27th January 2020
'Her daylilies bobbed wide open out in the wild, blue sun'
This week and next I want to show you two beautiful poems of grief and loss by David Baker, from his new and selected poems, Swift, published in 2019 by WW Norton. Baker teaches at Denison University ...
27th January 2020
The Shadow Factory: Deborah Harvey, Indigo Dreams
Deborah Harvey’s fourth collection is very readable and accessible, augmented by notes at the back of the book. She has taken a range of themes, from ‘The Good Dogs of Chernobyl’, the first poem, to g...
26th January 2020
Jane Burn wins Wolverhampton literature festival's poetry competition
Jane Burn has won the £400 first prize in the Wolverhampton literature festival poetry competition, run in conjunction with Write Out Loud, and judged by West Midlands poet Roz Goddard. The competitio...
22nd January 2020
Deadline nears for £1,000 Kent & Sussex poetry competition
Carrie Etter will be judging the Kent & Sussex Poetry Society’s £1,000 poetry competition. The deadline is 31 January 2020. More details
22nd January 2020
Dominic Berry at Sale Write Out Loud tonight
Dominic Berry is the guest poet at Write Out Loud Sale at the Waterside arts centre, Sale, on Tuesday 21 January. Entry is £3 to this open-mic poetry night and it starts at 7.30pm. More details and Ma...
21st January 2020
Saboteur awards launch cash plea after losing Arts Council funding for ceremony
The prestigious annual Saboteur Awards are appealing for funding help after losing their Arts Council grant for their 2020 awards ceremony. The indie lit awards, organised by Sabotage Reviews, have la...
21st January 2020
Write Out Loud at Bolton Socialist Club tonight
It’s Bolton Write Out Loud at Bolton Socialist Club on Sunday 19 January. Join hosts Jeffarama! and Gordon Zola for this open-mic poetry event. Arrive 7.30pm for 8pm start. Entry £1 plus raffle. More ...
19th January 2020
Poems for the planet: environmental poetry group plans all-day fundraising reading
Environmental poetry group Poets for the Planet are staging Verse Aid: Poems for the Earth, a fundraising poetry event on Saturday 8 February at the Society of Authors in London that will include an a...
17th January 2020
Skiffle pioneer and poet Hylda Sims dies at 87
Hylda Sims, a poet and musician who was one of the pioneers of skiffle, and in more recent years host of the Fourth Friday poetry and music nights at the Poetry Café in London, has died at the age of ...
16th January 2020
The Last Parent: Anne Stewart, Second Light
Bereavement, loss and love interweave in Anne Stewart’s latest collection. Her sequence ‘The Last Parent’, 31 poems that make half of the collection, stands out for its insights into the process of m...
16th January 2020
'He always came back just in time for the bell'
Poets Tom Montag and David Graham have just published a fine anthology, Local News: Poetry About Small Towns, from MWPH Books, PO Box 8, in Fairwater, Wisconsin. Here’s one of the many poems I’ve enjo...
16th January 2020
Write Out Loud at Marsden library tonight
It’s Marsden Write Out Loud on Wednesday 15 January at Marsden library, in Marsden Mechanics Hall, Peel Street, Marsden. Entry is £2 to this monthly open-floor poetry group. Read your own poems, someo...
15th January 2020
Roger Robinson wins £25,000 TS Eliot prize with 'A Portable Paradise'
The British-Trinidadian poet, writer, musician and performer Roger Robinson has won the £25,000 TS Eliot prize for his collection A Portable Paradise. The book tackles racism, violence and the Grenfel...
14th January 2020
'Our Romany culture will always survive': Raine Geoghegan
Late last year Raine Geoghegan launched a second pamphlet of poetry that documents and celebrates her Romany heritage. Her family picked fruit, vegetables and hops in Herefordshire and Kent, and many ...
13th January 2020
Write Out Loud at Stockport art gallery tonight
Members of Stockport Write Out Loud will meet at Stockport art gallery on Monday 13 January to share poems. Entry is £1.50 and it starts at 7pm. Each month poets contribute to a collage poem, and you ...
13th January 2020
Sodium 136: Carole Bromley, Calder Valley Poetry
Carole Bromley’s Sodium 136 is her account of being diagnosed and treated for ‘A Benign Cyst Pressing on Optic Nerve’. This is the title of the first poem in this collection, in which we’re thrown str...
10th January 2020
Write Out Loud Wigan at the Old Courts tonight
Write Out Loud Wigan is kicking off the new year with its first open-mic poetry night of 2020 at the Bailiffs Bar of the Old Courts arts centre, Crawford Street, Wigan on Thursday 9 January. This free...
9th January 2020
'Every Child Counts': Tony Walsh's poem and video boosts children's hospital
Leading performance poet Tony Walsh has written a poem and made a fundraising video for Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital that has already been viewed over 100,000 times since it was released on 2 ...
7th January 2020
Love songs of TS Eliot: Emily 'would have killed the poet in me'
An extraordinary statement by the poet TS Eliot about his long-running relationship with an American woman that continued during his first marriage has been published almost 60 years after it was writ...
7th January 2020
Mary Jean Chan wins £5,000 Costa poetry award
The poet and lecturer Mary Jean Chan has won the £5,000 poetry category of the Costa book awards for her first collection, Flèche, which explores themes of multilingualism, queerness, psychoanalysis a...
7th January 2020
'You hold life like a face between your palms'
There’s a very fine book, Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, published by Grayson Books of West Hartford, Connecticut, and I’ve found a number of poems for this column there. Here’...
6th January 2020
A CBE for Scotland's makar Jackie Kay in New Year honours list
Scotland’s makar – poet laureate - Jackie Kay has been awarded a CBE in the Queen’s New Year honours list. In 2006 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature. Jackie Kay was born to a Scottish ...
3rd January 2020
Reel to Reel: David Cooke, Dempsey & Windle
A sequence of poems about the Grimsby fishing industry, from its boom years to its washed-up present, forms the admirable centrepiece of this collection. David Cooke, who lived and worked in Grimsby f...
2nd January 2020
Write Out Loud says farewell and thank you to John Foggin
Almost a year ago we welcomed John Foggin and his first blog for Write Out Loud to our home page with an appropriate fanfare. It is only right that we should mark his final Great Fogginzo’s Wider Web ...
2nd January 2020
My milestone poet: Kim Moore
Just over two years ago I worked out that since April 2014, I’d published 275 posts on my own poetry site, the great fogginzo’s cobweb. I estimated that it meant I’d published about half a million wor...
2nd January 2020
'Purple trumpet blowing high notes at the sky'
I'm a big fan of short, imagistic, haiku-like poems, and here's a fine one for the end of the year. It's by Sarah Freligh of New York, from her book Sad Math, from Moon City Press.
DECEMBER
...1st January 2020
How Andy Jackson's 'Otwituaries' provide special send-off
A few weeks ago I was saddened to hear of the death of one of my great sporting heroes, the former England Test cricketer Bob Willis. But the sadness was lifted to some degree – even though I blubbed ...
1st January 2020
