Category Archives: poets and poetry

Three bursaries available for Arvon Poetry Workshop in Lincoln.

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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.

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

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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)

The Black Path free literary event, Wed 23 October.

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Don’t forget that there will be a free reading of work from The Black Path by last year’s students on the MA Creative Writing course.

The reading will take place in MC0025, 12.00 – 1.00, Wednesday 23 October (2013). Work will include poems, flash fiction and extracts from longer pieces.

Everyone welcome.

Poetry & Audience: 60th birthday celebration at Leeds University.

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P&A sculpture1

Prof John Whale with the sculpture bequeathed to the editors of P&A magazine in its early days.

P&A sculpture3

Saturday, 19 October, 2013

Editors past and present, together with various poets, magazine editors and current students gathered at the School of English at Leeds University to celebrate 60 years of Poetry & Audience.

Poetry & Audience is one of the longest-running poetry magazines in the UK and owes its longevity as much to the frequently crisis-driven student-owned nature of its existence as to the commitment of the School of English. It also forms an integral part of the strong literary tradition of Leeds, which includes JRR Tolkien and poets such as Geoffrey Hill, James Kirkup, Tony Harrison, Ken Smith, Jeffrey Wainwright, Jon Glover, William Price (“Bill”) Turner, Paul Mills and many others.

The anniversary involved a roundtable discussion of poetry magazine publishing, readings by P&A poets and editors and individual accounts of the history of P&A (Michael Blackburn, Elaine Glover, John Goodby, Emma Must, Chris Nield, Antony Rowland, Jeffrey Wainwright).

The event was hosted by Prof John Whale, with sessions chaired by Fiona Becket, Hannah Copley and Emily Timms (who also arranged an exhibition of P&A materials). Many thanks to all of them and anyone who I’ve forgotten to mention.

Participants: Michel Blackburn, Carole Bromley, Elaine Glover, Evan Jones, Paul Maddern, Adam Piette, John Goodby, Jay Parker, Christie Oliver-Hobley, Sarah Webster, Amy Ramsey, Mick Gidley, Elaine Glover, Emma Must, Antony Rowland, Jeffrey Wainwright, Hannah Copley, Eleanor Ford, Daniel Boon.

Current and former students of Lincoln may want to submit work to P&A, of course.

“Monkey Creates”, a poem by Nick Beaumont.

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Monkey Creates

The universe is an omelette.
An omelette, or maybe a quiche…
well anyway, the important thing is
it all started with an egg.

An egg with a bloody great crack
down the middle that fizzles
with dark energy. One day, it splinters
open from one too many bangs

on the celestial frying pan,
spattering globules of sticky blackness
across time and space.
The shell pirouettes away, leaving

a yolk that would have fallen if it wasn’t
for the lack of gravity, but instead
hangs in the gaping silence,
a black, undulating mass of chaos.

The mass is snoring.
But it doesn’t snore for long. Monkey wakes
and scratches his furry arse.
It’s pretty close in here he thinks,

so he lifts up his Monkey paws,
and pushes away the squishy black space yolk.
Above him he creates the great
celestial jungle, and below the waters

of the celestial rapids. He swipes
whole paw-fulls of oozing jelly
and skilfully fashions the
banana tree galaxy, the climbing frame

solar system, even the delicate
patterns of the tree vine constellations.
Exhausted, Monkey rests
on the great primordial rubber tyre,

ideally flicking fleas into the cosmos,
where they explode in soft plumes
of orange and purple, becoming
spiralling galaxies and unexplored nebulas.

By Nick Beaumont (alumnus 2010-2011).

The Black Path – MA students publish their first anthology.

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blackpath1
Students on the 2012-2013 year of the MA in Creative Writing have published an impressive paperback anthology of their own work.

The Black Path 1 (a second collection is nearing completion) comprises poems, flash fiction, short stories and novel extracts written by the students during the course of their studies.

What’s special about the book is that the students took the publishing initiative themselves, building on what they had learned during the MA. All the writing, collation, editing, design, typesetting and marketing is student-driven. Overall Editor is Shirley Bell, already a well-published poet.

The Black Path 1 is 132 pages long and can be bought from Amazon at £6.58.

A reading by contributors to the anthology will take place in the University on Wednesday, 23 October, 12.00 – 1.00 in room MC0025. More details to follow.

Contributors: Shirley Bell, Cassandra Cash, Stephen Blessett, Laura Clipson, Tina Daley, Stewart Norvill, Muayyad Elwaheidi, Jennifer Fytelson, Joel Leverton, Ian Turner, Matt Ellis and Rosemary Temple.