Pow! New performance poetry night to be launched in London
A new performance poetry night is being launched in south-east London. POW! – Play on Words – will be staged at the Bridge House theatre, Penge, and will be organised and compered by Lee Campbell, who will also be one of the performers. The first night on Sunday 3 October from 7-9.30pm will feature Frog Morris, Spike Zephaniah, and Kate Paul, plus six open-mic slots. Sign-up is on the night, first...
30th September 2021
Free weekend festival of spoken word lined up for Leamington
The second annual Leamington poetry festival returns to the town’s Temperance Café in October with fringe shows, comedy, workshops, open mics, and readings. The weekend of October 23-24 will be a free festival of the spoken word, with no ticket sales or booking required for any of the events.
Hig...
28th September 2021
'It's all yours, this father you make each day'
The monk’s tonsure is intentional, a shaved bald spot as part of the rituals of sanctification, but here, in his poem, ‘Tonsure’, Young sees this hereditary marker as a complex sign of the things a ma...
27th September 2021
The poetry of Coventry: things that Larkin forgot to mention
The opening verse from a poem by Philip Larkin is inscribed on a plaque at Coventry station. The poem, ‘I Remember, I Remember’, concludes in typically downbeat Larkin fashion: “ ‘Nothing, like someth...
27th September 2021
The Oscillations: Kate Fox, Nine Arches Press
The award-winning poet Kate Fox challengingly engages the reader in the peculiarity of being someone who is a ‘neurodivergent thinker’ in the difficult times of the pandemic. The collection is divided...
27th September 2021
THROW OPEN THE DOORS! LIVE OPEN-MIC POETRY RETURNS TO VENUES
Live, open-mic poetry is back, in case you hadn’t noticed! All around the country local groups have been returning to venues they haven’t performed at since the first lockdown in March 2020. And new o...
25th September 2021
Jenny Mitchell''s 'Map of a Plantation' wins international prize
Jenny Mitchell’s collection Map of a Plantation, about slavery on a Jamaican cane plantation, has won the Welsh poetry competition’s International Poetry Book award. Second was Alchemy by Fiona Perry,...
22nd September 2021
'We take on trust the dead are buried and gone'
Dorianne Laux is one of our treasured poets. Her elegant poems grow out of the familiar. 'Urn' is beautifully inventive in the way she connects the moment of uneasy childlike delight in the inexplicab...
20th September 2021
Constructions [Konstrukce]: Joshua Calladine-Jones, tall-lighthouse
This impressive debut pamphlet by Joshua Calladine-Jones features three sections that question the very roots of how we use language and proposes different ways of communication. This might entail mak...
18th September 2021
Katrina Naomi's sea-swimming poem wins £1,000 Keats-Shelley prize
A poem about sea swimming by Katrina Naomi, ‘in the kelp forest’, has won this year’s £1,000 Keats-Shelley poetry prize. Katrina said the winning poem was part of a series “written in response to dail...
17th September 2021
Linda Gregerson and John McAuliffe to judge £2,000 Troubadour competition
Linda Gregerson and John McAuliffe will be judging the £2,000 Troubadour international poetry prize. The deadline is 27 September. More details
14th September 2021
Will Harris to judge £1,000 Oxford Brookes poetry competition
Will Harris will be judging the £1,000 Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre’s international poetry competition. The deadline is 20 September. More details
14th September 2021
'Veiled, he's mysterious as a bride'
What haunts this loose sonnet by Carrie Green is loss, anticipated loss, but loss, nonetheless. Yet, what emerges is an elegant “pre-elegy”. A tender anthem to a father and to the sweetness he represe...
14th September 2021
Marples Must Go!: Greg Freeman, Dempsey & Windle
Marples Must Go! was the slogan which protesters spray-painted on a motorway bridge near Luton, with reference to the controversial Minister of Transport Ernie Marples, who oversaw the closure of a hu...
10th September 2021
Paul Muldoon on bill at Winchester festival's live weekend
Paul Muldoon will be appearing at Winchester poetry festival’s three-day live event in early October, which marks the culmination of five months of online events, as well as the Poet on the High Stree...
7th September 2021
100 Poems to Save the Earth, eds. Zoë Brigley and Kristian Evans, Seren
The timing for the launch of this anthology could not have been better given the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the COP26 UN climate change conference to be held in G...
7th September 2021
'It takes three days to tow our brokenness across the state'
Jehanne Dubrow’s finely crafted sonnet, her own “simple machine”, reminds us so well of that moment, full of contradictory emotions, when the things we think are “unfailing”, fail us. She reflects on ...
6th September 2021
Cures: Jo Brandon, Valley Press
Jo Brandon has worked as a domestic for the Royal Household, and as a tour guide, as well as an administrator for the Poetry Society and the Poetry School. She is now a freelance poetry editor, libret...
2nd September 2021
