How does one navigate a route through the maze that is British poetry when some 3000 poetry titles are published annually? Who are the exciting new voices making an impact on the poetry scene? What are they writing about? Are there movements or recurring themes?
It’s a tall order because movements often reveal themselves after they’ve passed on, and most poets cling fiercely to their independence and resist reductive labelling. While some poetry collections are theme- or narrative-based, most are pretty eclectic. It’s the nature of poetry – frequently oblique, opaque, crystallising and distilling particular experiences, ideas, memories, voices, through the poetic equivalent of montage and mural, and transforming the unremarkable into the memorable through the poetic form. In the UK today, poems are being constructed within the architecture of traditional forms, or being shaped more liberally with free verse, or, increasingly likely, poems are situated somewhere in between – the mutant sonnet is a favourite. British poets, like their counterparts world-wide, are trying to say what cannot be said, or has been said, but differently, because only when experience is imagined anew is the caul washed away from our eyes.
Please see Literature News for other recent and upcoming events.
Recent events
Poetry in East Asia
Poets Francesca Beard and Charlie Dark carried out performances and poetry workshops on writing skills and performance techniques in East Asia - Francesca visited the Phillipines and Vietnam in September, while Charlie went to Singapore and Malaysia in November 2007. Tom Forrest toured Vietnam in July and August 2007, where he delivered training sessions to teachers regarding Reader Development.
Writers-in-residence at California State University
Writers in the programme spend a month in the States with American students, teaching and contributing to campus and academic life as well as the cultural life of their host city. Residencies feature extensive author outreach and meaningful impact on both students and the general public. Nii Parkes was the British Council writer-in-residence at Cal State L.A. for the spring of 2007.
The British Council project, Poetry Quartets, in partnership with Bloodaxe Books, consists of a series of contemporary poetry recordings featuring poets reading and talking about their work. You can listen to the poems here. For biographical, bibliographical and critical reviews of poets use our Contemporary Writers website. To help you choose poetry to suit your mood use the enCompassCulture website poetry compass. Poems on the Underground are distributed to our overseas offices.
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