30.12.18

Becky Cherriman writes:

As is often the way there were a few strands of thought that led to the writing of The Flayed Fish.

Way back in the days of the British Empire, an ancestor of mine set up a tannery in Leeds and the spoils from that gave him enough money to buy a big country house. Nearby, in what is now a Leeds public park, I discovered a pond which shares my grandmother’s maiden name. It turned out it belonged to the ‘family home’. A distant relative still has ...

read more →

09.12.18

Charles Baudelaire is remembered in the popular imagination as a drug-addicted, washed-out, debauching poet, and lucky heir to a large fortune. His poetic work, Les Fleurs du mal, still inspire today’s generation. But why? When his reputation is characterised by seedy metaphors and phrases and his crude voice offended many readers at the time. Despite all this, it is Baudelaire’s voice that has persisted and still resonates in ears of the impressionable younger generations.

T.S...

read more →

17.10.18

From John Tenniel's classic illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Anne Caldwell writes..... 

Glynis Charlton is a writer and highly experienced arts project evaluator/manager who has worked for The Bronte Parsonage, Hebden Bridge Arts Festival and many other clients. She also runs Italian Writing Retreats. Glynis has many years’ experience of running workshops, both in Italy and in the UK.  Her work has been published both in print and on sc...

read more →

25.07.18

Oz Hardwick writes.... 

I first discovered the prose poem in a library, around 1976, with that focused serendipity which was so much a part of the pre-digital age. I was looking at photography books for a course I was taking – I remember looking at Abby Hirsch’s The Photography of Rock (which I haven’t seen since and have just had to Google to find Hirsch’s name) – and found myself flicking through Allen and Creeley’s The New Writing in the USA (a c...

read more →

31.05.18

Anne writes….

The prose poem as a form has been accepted for decades in France and America but has until very recently had a lower profile in the UK. As a poetic form, the prose poem can be traced back to the work of nineteenth-century French poets such as Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire. The poet Paul Hetherington in Australia has suggested that its lineage goes back to the Romantic Movement’s fascination with poetic fragments, and other writers cite the King James B...

read more →