This is a recording of our Summer Launch at the Southbank Centre, on June 25. The line-up consisted of poets Grace Nichols, Rory Waterman, Yousif M Qasmiyeh, Jennifer Wong, and Will Burns.

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.

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 [...]

“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?