News

Michael Laskey is a full time freelance poet, editor, and tutor who founded the international Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in 1989 and directed it through its first decade. He founded the poetry magazine Smiths Knoll with Roy Blackman in 1991 and since Roy's death in 2002 has been editing it with Joanna Cutts. As a poet he has published four collections and three pamphlets. His first two collections were both Poetry Book Society Recommendations: Thinking of Happiness and The Tightrope Wedding, which was also shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. Michael's day-long Poetry School workshop 'The Poem as Time Machine', looks at how poems can instantaneously take us out of the here and now, and transport us to any time, any place; a day building on the close reading of exemplary contemporary poems to generate lots and lots of new writing.

The Debris Field is a new multi-media production exploring the sinking of the Titanic, written and performed by poets and poetry school tutors Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe being shown at the BFI on the 14th April. The evocative poetic text is accompanied by original music from Oli Barrett of Bleeding Heart Narrative, and film by Jack Wake-Walker. The poets talk here about the inspiration behind their writing, lost manuscripts and uncovered relationships with the ship.

Kathleen Ossip's new workshopping course for The Poetry School takes a look at how contemporary American poets have turned toward political subjects, from terrorism to economic collapse to class tensions, as a way of enlarging their vision. Ossip's poems have appeared in some of the most prestigious literary magazines around: The Best American Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review and The Believer (among others). She has published two collections of poetry, The Search Engine and The Cold War, the latter having recently been shortlisted for The Believer Poetry Award. We speak here about her own poems, the impossibility of apoliticism and her new collection. 

Siddhartha Bose's debut collection of poems, Kalagora was published by Penned in the Margins in 2010. His play by the same name was performed in Edinburgh in 2011 to critical acclaim. In this play, and in his upcoming workshop with The Poetry School, Siddhartha focuses on the idea of the Megacity: how poets through history have responded to, written about and recreated the endless stimuli of urban living. Here, we talk to him about the definition of a Megacity, his poetry book of the same name and Baudelaire.

Malika Booker is a British writer and multidisciplinary artist of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage. Her poems have been widely published in anthologies and journals including Wasafiri, The Penguin Anthology of New Black Writing, and Ten New Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010). Her CV is a flurrey of writerly activity, and we're lucky enough to have her teaching for us in the Spring Term on a course 'Mapping Poetries', the idea for which actually came out of a Poetry School workshop that Malika took as a student. Here, she talks to us about 'Malika's Kitchen', geographical hybrids and her next collection.