The University of Leeds has a long and notable history of engagement with poetry through the Gregory Fellowships, its members of staff, and its students. The Brotherton Library’s Special Collections houses extensive poetry archives, including those of Simon Armitage, Tony Harrison, Geoffrey Hill, and Jon Silkin. Its holdings also include...
To mark the release of Birdsong on Mars, Jon Glover’s latest poetry collection, Poetry Intern Steph Bennett explores his impact on poetry at Leeds through Special Collections. Birdsong on Mars, Jon Glover’s first collection in eight years will be released by Carcanet Press this August. Its publication presents a great...
Unbooking poetry does not mean poetry is cancelled. In my previous blog, Unboxing Poetry, I talked about poetry-objects, citing examples of work that foreground poiein, the basis of poetry in ‘making’. Since that blog was posted, a lot has changed in how we interact with poetry. Many readings and...
Much has been made of the fact that the word ‘poem’ comes from the Greek poíēma, a ‘thing made’. As such, poets are makers of ‘things’ and for millennia poets and critics have debated the reasons for and approaches to this particular kind of thing-making. Lately, I’ve been thinking about...
The exhibition Poetry By Design, held in the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery (part of Leeds University Library Galleries) from 10th June – 23rd August 2019, told the story of the making, printing, and dissemination of visual and concrete poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. Curated by Professor...
Conquistadors In this afterthought he’s just turned six, the astronaut in him doing his damnedest to coincide the moon landing with his first kiss, hoping to plant his lips on —– ——–’s distant face as Simon Armstrong steps from the module onto Tranquillity Base. But...
I’m midway through the second of two great new books about what might be called ‘under-finished’ forms of literature. When we call food ‘under-cooked’ it’s usually a disappointed description of something that isn’t as it should be, something that hasn’t reached its potential. But what establishes a literary work as...
I heard a Black female poet make the remark recently: “People read ‘trees’, ‘rocks’, ‘minerals’, and so on in poetry written by African diaspora writers, and yet there is some deep-seated disinclination to ever think of them outside the prism of identity politics, despite their clear ecological concerns”. As I...
“Good morning, neighbour!” An old-fashioned greeting, shouted by two repair workers over the dilapidated wall of a government-owned house in Trinidad as I unthinkably walked, rather than drove, down the road, brought my mind right back to Leeds, and to the North. Travelling for poetry, I had started to feel...
I was excited to hear that Dr Denis Flannery is running a course called Bowie, Reading, Writing at the University of Leeds. As a student it would have been the kind of module I would have signed up for without hesitation, though the academic study of pop/rock music was generally frowned...