Three bursaries available for Arvon Poetry Workshop in Lincoln.

BURSARIES of up to £200 are available on this:

We’re offering three grants of £200 to cover a large proportion of cost of the weekend, which is £280 in total (including food and drink. We might consider offering the full fee depending on the applicant, but for now we’re offering £200 each.

I hope you are interested in the sounds of this, and would be able to promote it to your students. I have attached a PDF of our flyer which gives you a bit if the flavour of the course. More information can be found here: http://www.arvon.org/course/arvon-lincoln/

I am happy to speak with anyone interested in joining us, and so please do get in touch or put students in touch with me on 0207 324 2554. I work Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. If you have any advice or thoughts also about promoting the course I’d be interested to know.

 

Suzie Jones.

LINCOLN-FLYER

Free student membership of the Poetry Book Society.

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Students in higher education can join The Poetry Book Society for FREE!

The PBS has launched a free student membership, which is open to all UK higher education students, who can enrol by emailing or sending their proof of student identity to us.

Students can join online and contact will be via email. Once they have enrolled and logged in, student members will be able to view the online version of the Bulletin, our quarterly review of the best new poetry, in the restricted members’ area. They can also order books and receive their 25% members’ discount.

Go here for details.

Poems wanted from Lincoln MA writing grads for Siren Radio.

This is a message to all former and current grads of the MA.

I’ve been talking with Alex Lewczuk, founder of Siren Radio, the University’s community radio station, and one of its regular presenters, about getting some creative writing input to the radio.

My initial idea is to invite grads to submit some short pieces of their writing to be recorded for transmission on Siren. Poems fit the bill because they’re short, but there’s no reason we can’t think about longer prose pieces as well. Grads could read the work themselves or we could get someone else to do that for them. We can also consider the idea of having grads talking about their writing.

Recorded material would be preserved as a podcast on Alex’s radio site, Southside Broadcasting (and therefore available for replay on the internet), and you would have the benefit of the podcast as a promotional tool.

If you have any pieces you’d like us to consider, just email it to me at my University email.

More publishing success for Shirley.

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One of our grads, Shirley Bell, has a poem in The North 52 AND she is a Poet of the Week on the Poetry Super Highway (Facebook group) – “online during the week of June 23-29… and then forever thereafter on the Past Featured Poets archive section.”!

More about Shirley at her blog.

Free online poetry course (How Writers Write Poetry).

The Course

How Writers Write Poetry, a six-week course beginning on June 28, 2014, is an interactive study of the practice of writing poetry. The course presents a curated collection of short, intimate talks on craft by two dozen acclaimed poets writing in English. Craft topics include sketching techniques, appropriation, meter, constraints, sound, mindfulness, and pleasure. The talks are designed for beginning poets just starting to put words on a page as well as for advanced poets looking for new entry points, thoughts about process, or teaching tips. The course will be taught by University of Iowa International Writing Program Director and poet/translator Christopher Merrill as well as Black Rainbow Editions Editor and poet Mary Hickman. Contributing poets’ video talks will be contextualized through online discussion and writing assignments. The Poetry Teaching Assistants (all Iowa Writers’ Workshop students or graduates with university level experience teaching creative writing) will join Mary Hickman in offering online poetry workshops to participants. (Please note: we can’t workshop everyone, but we will workshop a representative selection of participants’ work every week.) Poets who have contributed video craft talks for the course include former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass, Kwame Dawes, Marvin Bell, Kiki Petrosino, Kate Greenstreet, and many others. How Writers Write Poetry will offer a diversity of answers to the question of how a writer develops and refines the lifelong practice of his or her craft. Enrollment in How Writers Write Poetry is free and unlimited.

Source/go to: How Writers Write Poetry.

New poetry: Poetry of Hospitals and Waiting Rooms, Shirley Bell.

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New from redplantpress, Shirley’s latest collection of poems written during the time her husband was waiting for his triple heart bypass.

You can buy the book from Amazon here, and read more at Shirley’s blog. Any profits will go to the British Heart Foundation.

And while we’re at it – congratulations to Shirley on getting her MA in Creative Writing!

Two poems by Susan Flower: “Homecoming” and “Bolsover Castle”.

HOMECOMING

I take the Romany’s sprigged heather,
tuck its pink tight buds curled like
baby fists tight as a talisman,
blue with longing, into my bag.

I am pierced mid-flight
by a hint of traveller she sees
within – an Irish woman
on the grandmother side,

Ellen Glancy unschooled, catholic
in tastes and religion,
pawned her soul for potatoes
that lay rotting, bleeding
into darkened sod.

Her pilgrimage to England
and Alfred, then retracing steps
to Enniskillen for the wedding,
returning to peg washing
not in a whipped north-easterly
which cut the souls.

Back across grey waters
fretful and choppy, till her own
broke a tidal wave, her firstborn.
Homesick for emerald patches,
a mercurial sky tilting meniscus,
struggling for freedom.

Iron rain lashes my face,
her slashed smile a rent petticoat.
Merging the troubles one with another,
I take her hand in mine,
it lies still but warm, without
need for words.

*****

BOLSOVER CASTLE

I stride the battlements; crenelated Portland stone,
Sheer five hundred feet below grassy fields.

A twenty-mile fish-eye panorama of peaks;
Arkwright’s Sutton Hall, Bess’s glass Hardwick.

Beyond receding greens to softened hues, greys
Through anthracite, slate, to a sooty-blue meniscus

The wind moans the miles, traps whispers in
An ancient avenue of limes to the riding stables, keep.

I descend eroded limestone steps, scoured clean
By tides of serfs; stranded in landlocked Derbyshire.

by Susan Flower (alumna 2010-2011)