a style from a despair.

ILK journal, edited by Caroline Crew, is now online, along with its first issue. Its manifesto is certainly bracing:

1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.

The Christopher Tower Poetry Competition, the UK’s most valuable prize for young poets, is once again open for entries, and this year students between 16-18 years of age are challenged to write a poem on the theme of ‘Voyages’.

Launched in 2000, the Tower Prizes are already established as among the most prestigious literary awards for this age group. The first prize is £3,000, with £1,000 and £500 going to the second and third prize-winners. In addition to individual prizes, the students’ schools and colleges also receive cash prizes.

The entries will be judged this year by poets Christopher Reid, Don Paterson and Peter McDonald. At the launch of the latest competition, Dr Peter McDonald, Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in English at Christ Church, commented: ‘Poetry’s future depends, in part, on the kind of encouragement we can offer our young poets. The winners of the Tower prizes all show how good young writers can rise to the challenges which this kind of competition sets’. The 2012 competition will build on the success of earlier competitions. Previous prizewinners such as Caroline Bird, Helen Mort (who read at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival), Richard O’Brien, Charlotte Runcie, Anna Lewis and Annie Katchinska are now gaining further acclaim in other competitions or within the publishing/ writing world.

An amusing article with some almost serious conclusions about how, as I have been thinking lately, contemporary poetry spreads itself rather thinly.

The winners of the Foyle Young Poets 2011 will be announced on Thursday. Apparently there has been a record number of entrants this year. Also, apparently none of them reads Keats, but this isn’t very interesting. The Poetry Society has not exactly impressed the world with its competence this summer, but hopefully they can make the most of the young talent the competition has attracted. These are promising times for poetry.

For the past several years, I’ve taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Uncreative Writing.” In it, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.
We retype documents and transcribe audio clips. We make small changes to Wikipedia pages (changing an “a” to “an” or inserting an extra space between words). We hold classes in chat rooms, and entire semesters are spent exclusively in Second Life. Each semester, for their final paper, I have them purchase a term paper from an online paper mill and sign their name to it, surely the most forbidden action in all of academia. Students then must get up and present the paper to the class as if they wrote it themselves, defending it from attacks by the other students. What paper did they choose? Is it possible to defend something you didn’t write? Something, perhaps, you don’t agree with? Convince us.

The Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition closes for entries on the 31st of October. The first prize is £5,000. I wrote about last year’s winner, Paul Adrian, back in March. Currently I am trying to write a poem for it about animals & personal hygiene & (unsurprisingly) it is not quite working out.

The theme is ‘skin’. I sit & try to think of what poems I know that are about skin.