Guest post: John Greening on celebrating the under-celebrated

Last night, I attended the Society of Authors’ annual awards ceremony at which many of the country’s leading literary prizes are announced. For the sixth year, I was helping to judge the Eric Gregory Awards for poets under thirty and Carol Ann Duffy was there to hand out the prizes (including a Travelling Scholarship to Worple Press’s Elizabeth Cook).

I think it’s important for older, more established writers to contribute in this way – after all, despite Facebook and Twitter, it’s not easy for young poets to make people take notice of their work. I remember only too well the nightmare of searching for a home for my own early collection. Eventually, Roland John’s Hippopotamus Press took it — Westerners, a book I’m still fond of, entirely about the two years I spent in Egypt. Roland’s press added to the diversity of the poetry scene in the 1980s as Peter and Amanda Carpenter’s Worple does now. Young writers depend on the generosity of small presses and appreciate the support and feedback that they can give.  That’s one of the reasons I respect Edmund Blunden, whose life is very much on my mind at the moment (I’m editing a new edition of Undertones of War for O.U.P.): he did so much to encourage other emerging figures (Ivor Gurney, for instance) and to revive interest in neglected poets such as John Clare.

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Elizabeth Cook at Nanyang Festival

Elizabeth Cook will be speaking at Transcultural Imaginaries: Making New, Making Strange – A Festival of Writing at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The festival, which runs from 14 – 17 June, features readings and workshops from writers from around the world, such as Olive Senior and Dermot Healy, alongside a number of Singaporean writers, including Grace Chia and O Thiam Chin. Elizabeth will be leading a poetry workshop and reading from her acclaimed work of fiction Achilles (Methuen, 2001).  Worple has recently reprinted Elizabeth’s poetry collection Bowl.

Guest post: ‘On Disappearing’ by Anthony Wilson

This post originally appeared on Anthony’s blog www.anthonywilsonpoetry.com

I wrote recently about poets who disappear from view, specifically Susannah Amoore, from Faber’s Poetry Introduction 6.

My point is far from faceitious: I once disappeared myself.

Readers of this blog will know I woke up on New Year’s Day in 2006 with a strange pain in my right side. Weeks of testing later I was told on Valentine’s Day this was caused by the pressure of a tumour on nerve endings near my kidneys. I had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system.

This was worrying for two reasons. Naturally I wanted to know if I would live or die.

Also, I  had a new book of poems coming out and knew I would be able to do nothing to promote it.

Doing my best to practice what my therapist would later call acceptance, I decided very quickly that maybe, just this once, the book could be left to look after itself while I got on with living and/or dying.

I make it sound easy. Let me tell you, it wasn’t.  Read more »

Worple Poets featured on new app!

Worple poets John Greening and Andy Brown are two of twenty-nine poets to feature on the newly launched poetry app “Words in Air”, available now from the App Store.  From Westminster Bridge to Westbury, Hammersmith to the Outer Hebrides, the app “offers you a unique way into poetry: poetry-in-place, in the palm of your hand. Enjoy a poem instantly, on the very spot which sparked its creation. Discover new poems — and poets. Re-discover familiar places through a poem. See which poem was inspired by a place nearest to you, across the UK. Stand in the place where these poets stood, and gain a deeper insight into the poem, and the place. Words in Air will pinpoint the place for you that sparked each poem. Visit, virtually and for real, to gain a deeper understanding of the creative process, through the revealing relationship between poetry and place.”