Not retro but metro: Write Out Loud Sale displays its range of poetic styles
I arrived at Write Out Loud Sale a little shame-faced, ready to hand myself in, as it were, not having attended for a while. And, like a child, it had grown since my last visit. My!
The venue at the Waterside arts centre has shifted to the gallery proper, now boasting a proper bar and more open-mic-poetry-shaped room. The artworks seem to have boosted the ambience for poetry, which, symbiotical...
31st March 2015
Bolton festival anthology wants submissions from northern poets
Organisers of Bolton’s Live from Worktown poetry festival are inviting submissions from poets in the north of England for the festival’s anthology. This year’s publication will be edited by Anne Caldwell, head of poetry at Bolton University. The deadline is 13 April. More details
29th March 2015
A meeting of minds: poet Owen Lowery puts artist Paula Rego's work into words
“It’s marvellous. We come from different countries, but he knows instinctively what the pictures are about, when most people don’t.” That was renowned artist Dame Paula Rego’s reaction at the Poetry L...
29th March 2015
Poetry School links up with Newcastle University to launch MA in poetry writing
The Poetry School has announced its new MA degree in writing poetry, in collaboration with Newcastle University. Starting September 2015, the two-year, part-time course will be based in alternative ce...
28th March 2015
Why I love Larkin - by Grayson Perry, chair of Ted Hughes award judges
Grayson Perry, who is chairing this year’s Ted Hughes award judging panel, has revealed that he loves the “bitter-sweet” poetry and “emotional constipation” of Philip Larkin.
In an interview with t...
28th March 2015
Fenland's poet laureate launches Poems for Peace anthology
Fenland’s poet laureate, Poppy Kleiser, will be launching Poems for Peace, an anthology of poems that explore conflicts from Iraq to Somalia, and from the Highlands to Heligoland, at Wisbech and Fenla...
27th March 2015
Deadline nears for £1,000 Philip Larkin poetry competition
Jean Sprackland will be judging the £1,000 Philip Larkin Society and East Riding poetry competition. The closing date is 10 April. More details
27th March 2015
Write Out Loud's Risk a Verse gets back on track in Huddersfield tonight
Beeching, Betjeman, and Burma’s death railway are lined up for Risk a Verse adherents on Thursday 26 March as Write Out Loud’s monthly poetry night in Huddersfield gets back on track with renewed poet...
27th March 2015
Poetry book deal for students as university and publisher link up
Creative writing students at Leeds Trinity University are celebrating their first book deal in a tie-up between Indigo Dreams Publishing and Wordspace, the university’s creative writing imprint. An Af...
27th March 2015
Kayo Chingonyi, and pictures of Dylan Thomas at Library Club
Zambian-born poet Kayo Chingonyi will be reading at the Library Club Members Club, in St Martin's Lane, Covent Garden, on Wednesday 25 March at 7.30pm. His debut pamphlet, Some Bright Elegance, was pu...
25th March 2015
Open mic and music at the Bowery - and a Seamus Heaney poem on the subway
One of the great strengths of the Write Out Loud poetry gig guide is the possibility of organisers using it to “claim a date”, to avoid the sort of frustrating duplication that occurred last and, it s...
25th March 2015
Selkie Sings: Mel Rees and Sarah Miller launch book
Award-winning playwright and poet, Mel Rees, once suggested that her writing career started when she was encouraged out of her reticence to read at an Oldham Write Out Loud event. Thank goodness she w...
24th March 2015
Tantalising language, but finger-clicking, too: interpreting Rae Armantrout
I didn’t previously know Pulitzer prize-winning, West Coast Language poet Rae Armantrout or her work, though we had conversed. She asked if I would mind her seat. Of all the possible choices of text a...
23rd March 2015
Writing workshops for youngsters in Calderdale with Gaia Holmes at Phoenix FM
If you’re a young person (aged 14+) in Calderdale who likes writing, why not join Gaia Holmes for a series of free workshops at Halifax-based community radio station Phoenix FM? The workshops will pla...
23rd March 2015
Write Out Loud Middleton at the Ring O' Bells tonight
Jacqueline Phillips is the guest poet at Write Out Loud Middleton at the Ring O’ Bells, St Leonards Square, Middleton, on Sunday 22 March. Entry is a £2 donation to this open mic event, hosted by Norm...
22nd March 2015
Deadline extended for £500 Wenlock poetry festival competition
The deadline of the Wenlock poetry competition has been extended for a few days to 29 March. The recipient of this year’s Queen’s Medal for Poetry, Imtiaz Dharker, will be the lead judge of the £500 W...
22nd March 2015
'I've been shocked at the emotional impact': Write Out Loud interviews Louise Fazackerley
Last year spoken word artist Louise Fazackerley - pictured, seated - was one of the three winners of BBC The Verb’s New Voices commission with her work Love is a Battlefield, set in Afghanistan and in...
22nd March 2015
Seven wonders of the world ... or 'a coffee for a poem' on World Poetry Day
Wenlock poetry festival’s poet in residence, Jean Atkin, pictured, will be marking World Poetry Day on Saturday 21 March by hosting a workshop sparked by the world’s marvels at Shrewsbury Museum and A...
21st March 2015
Poetry on the waterways: canal laureate Jo Bell appears in Channel 4's boating journeys programme
Canal laureate Jo Bell has made a TV appearance, popping up on a programme - about canals. Jo made her appearance during the first episode of Channel 4’s Great Canal Journeys, featuring Timothy West ...
19th March 2015
Novelist AL Kennedy to chair Forward prize judges
The novelist and dramatist AL Kennedy will chair this year’s all-female panel of judges for the 2015 Forward prizes for best collection, best first collection, and best single poem. Also on the panel ...
19th March 2015
Ploughing on! John Foggin wins poetry competition for second year in a row
John Foggin has won the Plough poetry prize for the second year in succession, it has been announced. It is his third poetry prize in a year, for, sandwiched in between the two Plough successes, he al...
19th March 2015
Veteran Beat poet Michael Horovitz marks 80th birthday with three 'jazz poetry superjams'
The legendary British Beat poet Michael Horovitz is marking his 80th birthday next month with three “jazz poetry superjams” on successive nights with jazz and poetry friends.
Horovitz will be perfo...
18th March 2015
Back in the UK: Write Out Loud at Marsden library tonight
Julian Jordon is back from his trip to the United States – see his Stateside Diary despatches – to host Write Out Loud Marsden at Marsden library on Wednesday 18 March. Entry is £3 to this open-floor...
18th March 2015
Steve Nash and Anna Percy at Write Out Loud Sale on Tuesday
Steve Nash and Anna Percy are the guest poets at Write Out Loud Sale on Tuesday 17 March at the Waterside arts centre, Sale. Entry is £3/£2 to this open mic event, hosted by John Darwin john.darwin@y...
17th March 2015
The Pilgrim's Trail: Frances Spurrier, Cinnamon Press
This is a book about time and memory, about the slippages between our days and hours. It is about how nature goes on, even though we can’t, about the long collective memory we humans share which is ca...
16th March 2015
New and Selected Sorrows: Goran Simic, Smokestack
Goran Simic is a name you may well have heard of. Some of his work has been translated by this year’s TS Eliot prize winner, David Harsent. He was born in 1954 in Sarajevo, 40 years after that famou...
16th March 2015
Young voices of the Mouthy Poets in Doncaster on Saturday
Mouthy Poets, a Nottingham-based collective aged between 15 and 30 who write, edit and perform their own poetry and produce events, teach poetry and help each other to develop personally and professio...
13th March 2015
Ted Hughes award winner Maggie Sawkins to launch 'Zones of Avoidance' collection
Maggie Sawkins will be launching her new collection, Zones of Avoidance, based on the live literature production that won last year’s Ted Hughes award, in Portsmouth on Saturday 28 March.
Ted Hughe...
12th March 2015
Gordon Zola to compere Write Out Loud Wigan tonight
Gordon Zola will be the guest compere at Write Out Loud Wigan, on Thursday 9 March 9 at the Old Courts , Wigan. Entry is free to this legendary open mic event, which starts at 8.30pm. More details and...
12th March 2015
Last Word festival looks back at legendary 1960s poetry 'incarnation' at Albert Hall
This year marks the 50th anniversary of a legendary poetry event - the First International Poetry Incarnation on 11 June 1965 that saw over 7,000 people pack the Royal Albert Hall to witness Allen Gin...
12th March 2015
Andrew Motion on shortlist for Ted Hughes award
A series of poems by the former poet laureate, Andrew Motion, based on interviews with soldiers in Afghanistan, has been included on the shortlist for the Ted Hughes award, for new poetry presented in...
10th March 2015
Stand up and slam! London's spoken word stars join Spine festival in libraries
Spoken word is well to the fore at a celebration of arts and literature in London libraries that begins on Thursday 5 March, World Book Day. Spine festival, from 5-15 March, and organised by Apples an...
10th March 2015
Benjamin Zephaniah at Picture the Poet show in Preston
Benjamin Zephaniah, Mike Garry and Ali Gadema will be performing in a free event at Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston, hosted by Apples and Snakes, as part of the National Portrait Gallery's to...
9th March 2015
Write Out Loud at Stockport art gallery tonight
Members of Write Out Loud Stockport will be meeting at Stockport art gallery on Monday 9 March at 7pm to read and discuss their own poetry. Entry is a £1 donation. Each month a collage poem is created...
9th March 2015
Farewell Leonard Nimoy, actor, director - and poet
As tributes continue to pour in after the death of Leonard Nimoy – Star Trek’s Mr Spock – it has come as a surprise to at least some of his admirers that the actor, director and photographer was a pro...
8th March 2015
Ash Dickinson heads cabaret night to raise cash for city's poor and homeless
Spoken word star Ash Dickinson is the headline act at the first fundraising event organised by poets, musicians and visual artists in York who have banded together to form Arts Against Homelessness, a...
6th March 2015
Reflections of a tireless poet: Elaine Feinstein on Sylvia Plath, TS Eliot, and brave Russian writers
Elaine Feinstein may now be 84, but “work is my game. It’s how I play”, as she says in the concluding poem, ‘Death and the Lemon Tree’, in her latest collection, Portaits, a series of acute, lively vi...
6th March 2015
Abegail Morley's haiku challenge to garden visitors
Kent-based poet Abegail Morley will be issuing a haiku challenge on World Poetry Day, 21 March, to visitors to Riverhill Himalayan Gardens, near Sevenoaks, Kent. Morley is poet-in-residence at Riverh...
6th March 2015
Fair pay for poets: top performer Kate Fox issues rallying call to win better deal after Bradford beck row
Can poetry pay? And when should it? Top performance poet Kate Fox is urging fellow poets and spoken word artists to get together to win a better deal for all, after being encouraged by the support she...
5th March 2015
One Evening in October I Rowed out on the Lake: Tua Forsström, trans. David McDuff, Bloodaxe
A brief sojourn in Finland is enough to teach the observer that the country is vast and largely uninhabited, for much of the year buried under ice and snow. Impossible then, for human beings not to be...
4th March 2015
Sean O'Brien to launch new collection at Newcastle poetry festival
Sean O’Brien, professor of creative writing at Newcastle University, will be launching his new collection, The Beautiful Librarians, at the start of Newcastle’s new international poetry festival, whic...
2nd March 2015
Utterly good fellow Richard Tyrone Jones bows out on wet night in New Cross
Richard Tyrone Jones is a leading spoken word performer and organiser, who, faced with a serious heart problem a few years ago, made light of it in a show and a Radio 4 sitcom. On a wet Tuesday night ...
2nd March 2015
Clare Pollard to perform Ovid's Heroines in Lancaster
Clare Pollard will be performing Ovid’s Heroines, based on her free verse translation of Ovid’s Heroides, a series of letter poems in the voices of women from Greek and Roman myth, at the Gregson comm...
2nd March 2015
Deadline extended for film poem competition aimed at poets in north
The deadline has been extended to 23 March for a £100 film poem competition aimed at performance poets in the north. Performance poetry organisation Apples and Snakes says: “We believe that a film poe...
1st March 2015
