News

Kate Potts has an MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths College, London, and has taught in Further and Adult Education for several years. Her pamphlet, Whichever Music was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the inaugural Michael Marks Award for pamphlets. Her poems have appeared in various magazines including Ambit, Magma, Poetry Wales and The Wolf.  Her debut full collection is published by Bloodaxe. She will be teaching 'Use Your Imagination: starting points for new poetry' for The Poetry School in the Autumn term.

This weekend sees London and Birmingham celebrating independent publishing with Free Verse: the London poetry book fair and The Birmingham Independent book fair on Saturday and Sunday respectively. At both events there will be abundance of new books from lots of publishers. Free Verse also has a day-long programme of events to keep you entertained, with readings from Glyn Maxwell, Luke Kennard and Roddy Lumsden, so you won't have to leave and can buy lots of books. 

Soldiers like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen fighting in the First World War gave us a written insight into the conflict that would have otherwise been lost, yet the subject of writing poetry about war is fraught with moral implications. Seni Seneviratne's online course will look at poetry that comes from war, striving to answer how we can write about war now, and without first hand experience of conflict, are we allowed?  

In John McCullough's new course with The Poetry School, he will be looking at how the distant past offers poets the opportunity to surprise readers with a range of vanished imagery and ideas, weird stories and lost words. Here, he talks about his personal interest in History, the unrecorded narratives of ordinary people and they myth of the past.

For the Autumn term, we've created 'The Tutor Academy', a brand new course where sessions are held by a different tutors on varied topics. We have a session on poetry and comics, letter poems and poetry and music amongst others. These are new poets bringing their ideas to The Poetry School for the first time. Here we learn a bit more about Chrissy Williams and her upcoming projects.