'Touch wood, cross fingers ... Out we come': laureate marks easing of lockdown with 'Cocoon'
Anyone experiencing mixed feelings about the latest easing of lockdown in the UK? The tonnes of litter left in public parks, the return of traffic jams on roads to the coast? Earlier this week the poet laureate Simon Armitage read a new poem, ‘Cocoon’, to mark the moment on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. Here it is:
COCOON
by Simon Armitage
Where did the world go?
Once round...
31st March 2021
Letters Home: Jennifer Wong, Nine Arches Press
Translator, poet and critic Jennifer Wong was born and grew up in Hong Kong. She studied English at Oxford and received an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She is the recipient of the Hong Kong Young Artist award (literary arts) and the runner-up prize of the Bi’an Awards 201...
31st March 2021
'Nothing moving but his quick beating heart'
José Alcantara’s poem, which appeared in the winter 2020 issue of Rattle, seems simple enough - a splendid and hopeful account of a familiar moment - a bird stunned by a collision with glass, held in ...
29th March 2021
Remembering May Ayim and Julia Darling at Dead [Women] Poets Society
Two women poets, May Ayim and Julia Darling, will be remembered when Dead [Women] Poets Society meet online on Sunday 11 April. Momtaza Mehri and Hannah Hodgson will be speaking about the lives and le...
28th March 2021
Get happy! School's My Happy Place poetry party links England - and Nigeria
Children from Lily Lane primary school in Moston, Manchester, shared another of their poetry parties online with other children from schools in the north-west of England, in Oxfordshire, south-west Lo...
28th March 2021
Going global: why not submit excerpts of your poems to our Instagram account?
When Write Out Loud relaunched our Instagram account back in November, we introduced a rolling open call for submissions of poetry excerpts. These are shared to our public feed, and so far, we’ve had ...
27th March 2021
Anxious Corporals: Alan Morrison, Smokestack
Alan Morrison is a left-leaning, much-published poet and editor who can produce wonderful, ringing phrases of denunciation: “O what hope for red roses / To grow among the thorns of red-top-hypnotised,...
27th March 2021
Fully booked! Our Write Out Loud poetry masterclass with guest tutor Rachel Long
We’re currently working hard behind the scenes to strengthen Write Out Loud and prepare ourselves to be able to support the post-Covid poetry community. We couldn’t have done that without your incredi...
26th March 2021
Marvin Thompson wins National Poetry Competition with 'The Fruit of the Spirit is Love (Galations 5:22)'
Marvin Thompson has won the Poetry Society’s £5,000 National Poetry Competition, for his poem ‘The Fruit of the Spirit is Love (Galatians 5:22)’. The poem alludes to Dante, the Bible, football, music,...
26th March 2021
Nick Toczek reaches his poetry milestone – a year of daily poems about the Covid-19 pandemic
Congratulations to veteran performance poet Nick Toczek, who on Monday reached his target of writing a daily Covid-19 poem for a whole year. Nick began on 15 March 2020, when the first lockdown was an...
25th March 2021
'A testimony to the power of poetry': Write Out Loud's Beyond the Storm anthology reviewed
As we mark a year since the start of the first Covid lockdown, Write Out Loud would like to share a heartening review of our Beyond the Storm competition anthology that has been published in the quart...
25th March 2021
Poetry competition celebrates role of key workers during pandemic
A competition celebrating the lives and stories of the UK's key workers - teachers or nurses, cleaners or couriers, carers or shopworkers – who have kept our nation going during the pandemic is free t...
24th March 2021
Emma Purshouse to judge £100 Red Shed competition
Emma Purshouse will be judging the £100 Red Shed poetry competition. The deadline is 31 March. More details
24th March 2021
Deadline nears for £1,000 Plough poetry prize
The 31 March deadline is nearing for the £1,000 Plough poetry prize, to be judged by Roger McGough. More details
24th March 2021
'We go nowhere for weeks. We're stiff and silent in these rows'
Only 0.03 per cent of us end up doing jury duty each year. But we all carry an awareness that it can be us next. According to casino.org a quarter of American adults serve on jury duty at lea...
22nd March 2021
Inhale/Exile: Abeer Ameer, Seren
Abeer Ameer is of Iraqi heritage, was born in Sunderland and grew up in Wales. She trained as a dentist in London and completed an MSc, developing an interest in the treatment of anxious patients and ...
22nd March 2021
The Feel-Good Movie of the Year: Luke Wright, Penned in the Margins
It feels authentic when Luke Wright writes about the state of England; he understands the kind of people that voted for Brexit. They are the same people who believe in Essex lions; he knows them, and ...
21st March 2021
Kwame Dawes takes over as editor of American Life in Poetry
Award-winning poet, author, and editor Kwame Dawes has published his first weekly column as American Life in Poetry editor, in partnership with the Poetry Foundation and University of Nebraska-Lincoln...
21st March 2021
André Mangeot to judge £600 Ver Poets competition
André Mangeot will be judging the £600 Ver Poets competition. The deadline is 30 April. More details
21st March 2021
Bolton's Live From Worktown to broadcast poems from around the globe on World Poetry Day
The Bolton-based arts organisation Live From Worktown is staging a virtual Cultural Cabaret event to celebrate World Poetry Day on Sunday 21 March at 7.30pm. Fourteen poets will be reading 14 poems, m...
21st March 2021
Anti-slam, London, 2016
“Welcome to the worst night of your lives!” That was the enticing introduction from host Dan Simpson at the start of the Anti Slam Apocalypse, a grand UK final of anti-slammers from around the country...
20th March 2021
'The box of light that had been a tree': after many drafts, AI's latest attempt at poetry
An artificial intelligence has attempted to write poetry about the beauty of trees, and come up with the image of a “box of light that had been a tree”.
The Guardian reports that the algorithm was ...
20th March 2021
Sale Write Out Loud's Sarah Pritchard donates book proceeds to women's centre
The organiser of Sale Write Out Loud, Sarah Pritchard, is offering to donate the proceeds of sales of her autobiographical poetry collection, When Women Fly, to Stockport Women’s Centre, where she vol...
17th March 2021
'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...
16th March 2021
Poetry in a family’s time of transition: how it helped Claire Dyer to embrace her child’s gender journey
Claire Dyer is a poet, novelist, and mother. Her new poetry collection Yield is about her child transitioning from son to daughter, and traces the process in which she moved from grief to understandin...
16th March 2021
'They whirl out the door, the blue sky a sudden surprise'
Pat Emile, who served as assistant editor to American Life in Poetry for over a decade, was described by past editor Ted Kooser as the “Jill-Of-All-Trades for this column”. I was fortunate enough to e...
15th March 2021
TS Eliot's estate invites cultural responses to 2022 centenary of 'The Waste Land'
TS Eliot’s poem ‘The Waste Land’, first published in the inaugural issue of the Criterion in October 1922, celebrates its centenary in 2022 - and the mark this moment, the poet and playwright’s estate...
15th March 2021
Praise from Sturgeon as 'inspirational' Jackie Kay's five-year tenure as Scotland's makar ends
Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon has praised the "outstanding contribution" of makar Jackie Kay, as her term of office as Scotland's national poet comes to an end.
Scotland's third makar –...
15th March 2021
Lear was here: celebrating 150th anniversary of 'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat'
Grab your runcible spoon, set sail with the Jumblies and learn how to make an amblongus pie with Britain’s beloved master of nonsense humour. Embarking on April Fool’s Day, the community of St Leonard...
14th March 2021
'Self-publication? It’s a perfectly respectable way to get your book into print'
Rodney Wood is a long-time poet and co-compere of Write Out Loud Woking. He recently decided to investigate how difficult or easy it is to self-publish your own pamphlet. Here’s how he got on:
...
12th March 2021
Wow, readers! Write Out Loud's Matt Abbott pops up at a poetry slam - in the Beano!
Here’s an accolade that I never anticipated adding to my poetry CV. In the latest issue of Beano magazine, there’s a cartoon poetry slam in which I’m one of the participants. Introduced onto the stage...
10th March 2021
Yield: Claire Dyer, Two Rivers Press
This collection is about a mother’s journey as her child transitions from son to daughter; as the poet moves from seeing a “honeycomb heart shatter, fall”, to anticipating going clothes shopping toget...
10th March 2021
Ranting poets, London, 2015
Back in the 1980s, Ranting poets were very angry - angry about the conditions that led to the inner city riots, angry about the miners’ strike, angry about unemployment, and a host of other issues. No...
9th March 2021
Footsteps of Ted Hughes: trails map traces poet's Yorkshire roots
Fans of Ted Hughes can follow his footsteps along six new walks in West, South, and East Yorkshire. The Discovering Ted Hughes’ Yorkshire trails have been put together by experts at the University of ...
9th March 2021
A poem to mark International Women's Day by Rachel McGladdery
On International Women’s Day we at Write Out Loud spotted a poem that we wanted to share with you. It’s by Rachel McGladdery, a former Write Out Loud blogger, who wrote it on the day on her phone “whi...
8th March 2021
Jumping into a Waterfall: Anna Percy, Flapjack
Manchester-based Anna Percy is a firework of a poet. But I am left pondering what sort of firework – not a rocket, not a Roman candle, more a Catherine wheel, swirly, sparky and deceptively dangerous.
...8th March 2021
Inauguration poet Amanda Gorman 'followed home and accosted by security guard'
The young American poet who won acclaim for her performance at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, has told of being followed home and accosted by a security guard who allegedly claimed she looked sus...
6th March 2021
'Literature lover' granted wish to be buried in Sylvia Plath churchyard
The Church of England has granted the request of a woman who lives in Oxfordshire to be buried in the same Yorkshire cemetery as Sylvia Plath, because she felt “profoundly spiritual” during a visit to...
6th March 2021
How much do we value our health workers? One poet's reaction to news of their 1% pay rise
Write Out Loud showed its support for health workers last year with its Beyond the Storm poetry competition that raised £7,500 for the NHS Charities Together Covid-19 urgent appeal.
Hundreds of hea...
5th March 2021
Alexa, what is there to know about love?: Brian Bilston, Picador
How has a poet with a pseudonym, whose work mostly rhymes and includes a large slice of humour, amassed so many followers – more than 80,000 at the latest count – on Twitter? The answer may indeed lie...
5th March 2021
Wordsworth? Just ‘a stuck-up old poot’, according to those in the know
I never really got on with Wordsworth. From the start of our relationship, I found him preachy and prosy, telling me how I ought to feel and saying what things meant rather than describing them. He sa...
5th March 2021
Foyle Young Poets of the Year competition launched
The Foyle Young Poets of the Year competition for 11-17-year olds was launched on 4 March, World Book Day. The judges this year are Clare Pollard and Yomi Sode, and the deadline is 31 July. More deta...
4th March 2021
'That which we are, we are': Tennyson quoted in chancellor's Budget speech in Commons
You don’t expect poetry to crop up in a chancellor’s Budget speech. But on Wednesday Rishi Sunak – more known for polishing his image on social media than for any interest in 19th century Victorian bl...
4th March 2021
From Coventry, to Hiroshima, and on to Dresden: Write Out Loud interviews Antony R Owen
Antony Owen is a poet of war and peace, who posted poems on that subject on Write Out Loud more than a decade ago. He has gone on to publish several collections – including one, The Nagasaki Elder, th...
3rd March 2021
'Transformation' theme for Cheltenham poetry festival's single poem competition
The theme is ‘transformation’ and Fiona Sampson is the judge of the £300 Cheltenham poetry festival single poem competition, with the additional prize of a guest slot at a Cheltenham poetry festival o...
2nd March 2021
Young people's laureate offers writing tips to stay positive during lockdown
The young people’s laurate for London, Cecilia Knapp, has launched a campaign via the organisation Spread The Word to encourage young people to use writing and poetry to keep positive and feel connect...
2nd March 2021
Alexa, what is there to know about love?: Brian Bilston, Picador
How has a poet with a pseudonym, whose work mostly rhymes and includes a large slice of humour, amassed so many followers – more than 80,000 at the latest count – on Twitter? The answer may indeed lie...
2nd March 2021
James Pollock wins £10,000 Manchester Poetry prize
James Pollock, a Canadian poet and critic, has won this year’s £10,000 Manchester Poetry Prize. The prize was devised in 2008 by the former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. It is run by the Manchester W...
1st March 2021
Deadline day for £1,000 RSPB and Rialto nature and place competition
Daljit Nagra will be judging the £1,000 RSPB and the Rialto Nature and Place poetry competition. Poems are invited that deal with any aspect of nature and place – these terms will be given a wide inte...
1st March 2021
The Alchemy of 42: Polly Stretton, Black Pear Press
Polly Stretton is chair of the Open University Poetry Society, one of the Croome Poets linked with a National Trust mansion and park in Worcestershire, and has worked with children in schools. Her fir...
1st March 2021
