“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 [...]

Mohammed El-Kurd is an award-winning poet, journalist, and activist from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, Palestine. His work has been featured in the Guardian, the Nation, and Al Jazeera English. In September 2021, Mohammed, along with his twin sister Muna, was named one of the ‘The 100 Most Influential People of 2021’ by Time magazine. Rifqa (Haymarket Books, 2021) is his first poetry collection.

Czesław Miłosz wrote that ‘a poet participates in the management of the estate of poetry’. However, when we roam around ‘the estate of poetry’, what do we encounter? Are the walls high and the gates locked? Is there an enormous flight of steep stairs with no lift in sight? Who is inside the estate, and who is outside the walls, waiting to be let in?

After taking a break last year as we took Poetry London on tour around the UK to celebrate the publication of PL’s 100th issue, we’re happy to be back with the second episode of the Poetry London Podcast. This episode features readings by poets Chris McCabe, Romalyn Ante, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.

The year 1922 was ushered in with a megaphone. On 24 January, Edith Sitwell held the private debut of Façade, her modernist poem, with avant-garde musical accompaniments by the little-known teenager composer William Walton. At the first public performance the [...]

‘Why would anyone want to read old reviews by someone who isn’t even in an English Department, who understands next to nothing about Theory?’ So asks John Greening in the preface to this selection of his reviews and essays, all [...]

In her third instalment of her exclusive column for Poetry London, Camille Ralphs takes a riotously funny look at a ninety-year-old compendium of bad poetry and considers what separates ‘bad verse’ from ‘good bad verse’. Is it possible for us [...]

Selima and Julia first met in the Ladies toilets on the top floor of City Hall, London. They were there for the National Poetry Competition presentations in 2002, when Selima was part of the judging panel and Julia had been [...]

For some reason, I’ve been thinking lately about an ornament in my childhood home. It looks like a flower trapped inside a star, with eight orange and blue petals intersecting the perimeter of an eight-point ceramic tile. My parents bought [...]

Threa Almontaser The Wild Fox of Yemen Picador £10.99 lisa luxx fetch your mother’s heart Out-Spoken £10 Nidhi Zak / Aria Eipe Auguries of a Minor God Faber £10.99 Outside, the news is always breaking. For Middle Eastern witnesses, the [...]

As a judge, I always ask myself the following questions when selecting the winners: What haunts you? What stands out? What poem made you forget you were a judge and ignited your curiosity, your admiration, your appreciation? Then, I make my decisions.

by Jon Stone An odd thing: whenever I see or hear the words ‘my father’ in a poem, I almost immediately tune out. It’s like a deactivation switch. Sometimes I have to fight the urge to visibly sigh, groan, or [...]