News

Merry Christmas everyone!

We caught up with Poetry School student Mark Burnhope to talk about Blakean influence, being a 'religious poet' and fever dreams. Mark was born in 1982 and studied at London School of Theology before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Brunel University. His work has appeared in a variety of print and online publications. He currently lives and writes in Bournemouth, Dorset with his partner, four stepchildren, two geckos and a greyhound. The Snowboy (Salt) is his debut poetry pamphlet. 

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.

There’s been lots of best of 2011 poetry lists doing the rounds at the moment, so we thought we’d do ours! In no particular order, here are our top ten poetry books published this year and why we love them.

It was only after we booked Chris McCabe for his new course 'The Plural Experiment', that we found out that his poetry was actually pretty 'experimental'. We should have guessed from the title really. Anyway, we thought we'd try and see how experimental he really is by giving him an unrelated task whilst at the same time ripping off the Metro. We asked him questions, to which he was only allowed to answer in 140 characters. He passed our experimental test, and he also gave us a poem! To book on to his course, which focuses on the any number of poetic tropes bordering the norm: the tradition of experimentation, Fluxus, Concrete poetry, Projective Verse, randomness, using the syllable, simultaneity etc, click here.