New Writing in New Writing

Our paper focuses on issues of permission and the space for creative writing practice. he paper began as a reflective piece on space and face-to-face poetry workshop practices but, because of the way the pandemic is potentially changing so much about how writers of all ages are able to work, we thought it was important to begin to explore some of the new challenges and opportunities for creative writing post-COVID.

Vision: some favourite poems for NPD

Happy National Poetry Day 2020 everyone. I hope you are feeling excited and nurtured by all the poetry treats that are winging your way today – and that you can store some of them up to see you through these difficult autumn days. The theme of this year’s NPD is ‘Vision’ which is a lovely subject, open to many different interpretations. Here are some of my personal favourites on that broad theme…

Translating Rilke, Montale and Tang Dynasty poets

Shoestring Press poets Matthew Barton, Roy Marshall and Martin Stannard gave us a marvellous evening of poetry in translation at Five Leaves Bookshop last week. Their approaches to translating from Italian, German and Chinese were very different, reflecting their own distinct poetic voices.

I’ll never get over the moon

It’s been a moon filled month and for a certified moon geek like me, who wrote her first poem about the moon in the weeks of excitement that summer in 1969, it has been a blast. First there was the fantastic Apollo 11 film directed by Todd Douglas Miller and there’s always been moon-related poetry to inspire us.