France's springtime for poets: is it losing its lustre?
While the UK has National Poetry Day, the French have Le Printemps des Poètes, which perhaps translates literally as Poets’ Springtime. It’s an immense national festival, a huge celebration of poetry over several days with hundreds of events right across the country, always held around international poetry day, designated by Unesco as 21 March. Towns and villages elect to be a part of it, organ...
8th December 2012
And it was at that age that poetry arrived in search of me
I am glad that we at least are doing something for World Poetry Day. UNESCO UK does not seem to have done much to promote it, disappointingly.
We do, largely, have a rather anglo-centric view of poetry in this country, one that could perhaps be challenged on such a day. Our minds might be ope...
25th March 2012
WOL favourite adapts Rabelais for Radio 4
Prolific Radio 4 playwright, Lavinia Murray - known to her friends on Write Out Loud via her Moxy Casimir persona - has adapted Francois Rabelais’ most famous work, Gargantua and Pantagruel, as a t...
10th December 2011
Performance or page? Meeting of minds at Lumb Bank
The world of open-mic poetry just went up another notch, as a wonderfully diverse group of poets worked and performed together on our recent week-long Write Out Loud/Arvon open-mic poetry course. W...
7th December 2011
Roy Harper and the politics of poetry
Are poets supposed to do something, to make a difference? Watching Singer/Songwriters on the BBC just now made me look at Roy Harper’s website. I first inhaled his work with the smoke from my house...
22nd November 2011
Poems that are really a list
In our creative writing sessions in Marsden Library we have been playing with the idea of list poems, and Francesca Beard’s is a superb example, not least with its title, The poem that was really a...
17th October 2011
