Much has changed in the world of poetry since we celebrated the launch of our Autumn 2022 issue just five months ago. After sixty-four years in print, Ambit folded just shy of its 250th issue, while The Moth’s Spring 2023 [...]

As the Forward Prizes celebrate their first thirty years of existence, Camille Ralphs takes us back to 1992 and the first edition of these awards, employing the occasion to revisit poems by Tony Harrison, Jo Shapcott and Elizabeth Garrett featured in the inaugural Forward Book of Poetry.

The first poem in any collection is perhaps the most important. It establishes the relationship with the reader, choosing whether to hold their hand or push them out the window. I think that’s especially true when setting forth an unconventional [...]

A reader of J. M. Synge or the Blasket Island writers of the early twentieth century cannot help but notice how much closer life in the West of Ireland seemed to the American east coast than to Dublin. A contemporary [...]

Earlier this year, I moved house for the first time in decades, and one day, after several weeks, I noticed a small crack in one of the top corners of my bedroom, about the width of a hair and about [...]

Instead of bemoaning or espousing what the internet has done to poetry (though it’s a real subject), let’s reapproach literary history, keeping in mind what has been foregrounded – made unignorable – by the internet. Why, on revisiting ‘The Waste Land’ in 2022, the hundredth anniversary of its publication, do I hear Batman’s Joker, or one of those terminally online males obsessed with him: a would-be-spectacular, self-promotingly ominous provocateur?

In this exclusive textual-visual presentation on three poems originally composed in Griko—the language of Greek origins spoken in the Southern Italian province of Lecce, in Grecìa Salentina (Puglia)—the writer and academic Manuela Pellegrino introduces us to the beauties and complexities of this seriously endangered language.

In her fourth instalment of her exclusive column for Poetry London, Camille Ralphs revisits The YOLO Pages (2014), an influential anthology of internet-influenced poetry, poems, image macros, tweets, and flarf. On the night of February 12, 2016, the post-internet poet [...]

Stav Poleg’s debut collection The City is a work of surreal and fantastical reach. Diaristic in tone, it meanders through cities, questioning their reality and unreality. Circumventing logic for the sake of theatricality, the poems evade natural laws: guitars are [...]

Poetry London‘s Summer 2022 readings, with readings from Grace Nichols, Rory Waterman, Yousif M Qasmiyeh, Jennifer Wong and Will Burns.

“As institutions and festivals big and small have begun to return to solely in-person events, my enthusiasm for poetry itself began to wane” the poet and critic Karl Knights confesses in our Summer issue’s featured essay, ‘No Disabled People Wanted [...]