Poetry & Audience: 60th birthday at Leeds University.

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Prof John Whale holds sculpture by Hubert Dalwood bequeathed to P&A in its early days.

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Saturday, 19 October, 2013

Editors past and present, together with various poets, magazine editors and current students gathered at the School of English at Leeds University to celebrate 60 years of Poetry & Audience.

Poetry & Audience is one of the longest-running poetry magazines in the UK and owes its longevity as much to the frequently crisis-driven student-owned nature of its existence as to the commitment of the School of English. It also forms an integral part of the strong literary tradition of Leeds, which includes JRR Tolkien and poets such as Geoffrey Hill, James Kirkup, Tony Harrison, Ken Smith, Jeffrey Wainwright, Jon Glover, William Price (“Bill”) Turner, Paul Mills and many others.

The anniversary involved a roundtable discussion of poetry magazine publishing, readings by P&A poets and editors and individual accounts of the history of P&A (Michael Blackburn, Elaine Glover, John Goodby, Emma Must, Chris Nield, Antony Rowland, Jeffrey Wainwright).

The event was hosted by Prof John Whale, with sessions chaired by Fiona Becket, Hannah Copley and Emily Timms (who also arranged an exhibition of P&A materials). Many thanks to all of them and anyone who I’ve forgotten to mention.

Participants: Michel Blackburn, Carole Bromley, Elaine Glover, Evan Jones, Paul Maddern, Adam Piette, John Goodby, Jay Parker, Christie Oliver-Hobley, Sarah Webster, Amy Ramsey, Mick Gidley, Elaine Glover, Emma Must, Antony Rowland, Jeffrey Wainwright, Hannah Copley, Eleanor Ford, Daniel Boon.

Current and former students of Lincoln may want to submit work to P&A, of course.

Creative Writing MA students publish their first anthology.

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Students on the 2012-2013 year of the MA in Creative Writing have published an impressive paperback anthology of their own work.

The Black Path 1 (a second collection is nearing completion) comprises poems, flash fiction, short stories and novel extracts written by the students during the course of their studies.

What’s special about the book is that the students took the publishing initiative themselves, building on what they had learned during the MA. All the writing, collation, editing, design, typesetting and marketing is student-driven. Overall Editor is Shirley Bell, already a well-published poet.

The Black Path 1 is 132 pages long and can be bought from Amazon at £6.58.

A reading by contributors to the anthology will take place in the University on Wednesday, 23 October, 12.00 – 1.00 in room MC0025. More details to follow.

Contributors: Shirley Bell, Cassandra Cash, Stephen Blessett, Laura Clipson, Tina Daley, Stewart Norvill, Muayyad Elwaheidi, Jennifer Fytelson, Joel Leverton, Ian Turner, Matt Ellis and Rosemary Temple.

Publishing success for two of our MA Creative Writers.

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Two of our students, Jennifer Fytelson and Shirley Bell, have had poems accepted in magazines.

Jennifer recently had a poem in The Mitre, North America’s oldest literary magaine, published by Bishop’s University in Canada.

Shirley has a poem in a forthcoming issue of The Rialto, one of the UK’s top poetry magazines and publishers.

Congratulations to both of them!

Creative Writing MA grad, Nick, sets up his own online business.

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Nick Beaumont (graduated 2011), has launched his own online business, NPcontent, specialising in content production, SEO-enhancement and advertising copy. Having spent two years in China, Nick is also able to help businesses who are planning to work there.

Take a look at NBcontent.

What case for the Humanities?

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Dante

Stanley Fish:

Humanists are advised “to apply their work to the great challenges of the era as well as pursuing basic curiosity-driven research.” “Curiosity-driven” means driven simply by the desire (often obsessive) to determine the truth of a matter, independently of whether it is a truth that will rise to an era’s great challenges.

That of course is precisely how the academy, and especially the humanist academy, has traditionally been conceived — as a cloistered and separate area in which inquiry is engaged in for its own sake and not because it yields useful results. It is the rejection of this contemplative ideal in favor of various forms of instrumentalism that underlies the turn away from the humanist curriculum. The rhetoric of the report puts its authors on the side of that ideal, but when push comes to shove, they are all too ready to dilute it in the name of some large abstraction — democracy, culture, social progress, whatever. They are, in short, all too ready to depart from the heart of the matter.

Read on at NYTimes Opinionator.

Charlotte Mew, an imp with brains but a forgotten poet.

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Illustration: Ellie Foreman- Peck

Illustration: Ellie Foreman- Peck

Mew was certainly doll-like in stature: she wore size-two boots, which she bought at F Pinet in Mayfair. Born in 1869 into a genteel, middle-class, Victorian family and with a domineering mother insistent on keeping up appearances at any cost, Mew was – on the face of it, at least – surprisingly unrepressed. She went where she wanted, unchaperoned, and smoked her own hand-rolled cigarettes.

Source: Julia Copus in The New Statesman.