Poetry Live is a series of annual events in venues across the UK where poets perform their poetry for school children studying GCSE level English Literature.
Poetry Live has its origins in the Updates conferences which founder Simon Powell organised for A-Level students.
Early contributors included Beryl Bainbridge, Hanif Kureishi, Martin Amis, Jim Crace, Andrew Davis, Doris Lessing, Edna O’Brien, Richard Eyre, Willy Russell, Arnold Wesker, Alan Bleasdale, Melvyn Bragg, Germaine Greer, Peter Hall and Margaret Drabble, who performed for audiences of more than 2,000 school children.[ citation needed ] In later years, the event focussed on poetry, including day-long events with poets such as Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, James Fenton, Tony Harrison, U A Fanthorpe, Benjamin Zephaniah, Simon Armitage, Glyn Maxwell, Gillian Clarke, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Lochhead and Andrew Motion. [1]
Powell realised that the Updates audience had become 'self-selecting consumers of literature', [2] and theorised that the conferences must reach a younger, broader audience. He created Poetry Live to engage 15-16 year old students with the texts they were being asked to study as part of their GCSE English Literature course.
The original 1990s Poetry Live tour consisted of 50 events, with an audience of around 75,000 students, [2] and grew to an average audience of 100,000 students a year by 2008. [1]
The tours consist of a core group of poets reading work from the AQA Poetry Anthology. During the 2009/2010 season the roster included Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Gillian Clarke, John Agard, Imtiaz Dharker, Grace Nichols, Daljit Nagra and Moniza Alvi. The current (2022/2023) roster includes poet laureate Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, John Agard, Imtiaz Dharker, Daljit Nagra, Owen Sheers and Grace Nichols. [3]
In addition to the regular roster formed of poets from the AQA Anthology, organisers try to introduce an 'outsider' to each year's tour.
Poetry Live events always involve a reading by each of the featured poets, including an introduction to the piece which asks students to consider the context in which it was written, and teaches them to differentiate between the poetic and non-poetic voice. [1] Following the reading, students are given the opportunity to ask questions about the work.
Finally, the examiner sessions are an opportunity for students to receive practical advice about the English Literature GCSE exam from the examiners themselves. The first session teaches the skills needed to interpret and discuss previously-unseen poems that may appear on the exam. The second session teaches students how to compare two poems, a key component of the exam. [3]
AQA Chief Examiner Peter Buckroyd said that Poetry Live had a positive effect on GCSE students, identifying the following benefits:
Buckroyd stated that these learnings lead to students understanding that 'it's their own response to a poem, backed up by evidence from the poem, that matters and which gets them the higher grades.' [1]
Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, and her term expired in 2019. She was the first female poet, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly lesbian poet to hold the Poet Laureate position.
Simon Robert Armitage is an English poet, playwright, musician and novelist. He was appointed Poet Laureate on 10 May 2019. He is professor of poetry at the University of Leeds.
Patience Agbabi FRSL is a British poet and performer who emphasizes the spoken word. Although her poetry hits hard in addressing contemporary themes, it often makes use of formal constraints, including traditional poetic forms. She has described herself as "bicultural" and bisexual. Issues of racial and gender identity feature in her poetry. She is celebrated "for paying equal homage to literature and performance" and for work that "moves fluidly and nimbly between cultures, dialects, voices; between page and stage." In 2017, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
The King's Gold Medal for Poetry is awarded for a book of verse published by someone in any of the Commonwealth realms. Originally the award was open only to British subjects living in the United Kingdom, but in 1985 the scope was extended to include people from the rest of the Commonwealth realms. Recommendations to the King for the award of the Medal are made by a committee of eminent scholars and authors chaired by the Poet Laureate. In recent times, the award has been announced on the birthday of William Shakespeare, 23 April. However, Don Paterson was awarded the medal alongside the 2010 New Year Honours.
Gillian Clarke is a Welsh poet and playwright, who also edits, broadcasts, lectures and translates from Welsh into English. She co-founded Tŷ Newydd, a writers' centre in North Wales.
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
"Havisham" is a poem written in 1993 by Carol Ann Duffy. It responds to Miss Havisham, a character in Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations, looking at her mental and physical state many decades after being left standing at the altar, when the bride-to-be is in her old age. It expresses Havisham's anger at her fiancé and her bitter rage over wedding-day trauma and jilted abandonment. Duffy's use of language is very powerful and passionate. Throughout the poem oxymorons and juxtaposition such as "Beloved sweetheart bastard" and "Love's hate" portrays the ambivalence and restless uncertainty of the character, while a sexual fantasy reveals both the unrequited love and the passion that remains within Havisham following the wedding, a devastation from which her heart has never recovered.
Grace Nichols FRSL is a Guyanese poet who moved to Britain in 1977, before which she worked as a teacher and journalist in Guyana. Her first collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. In December 2021, she was announced as winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Imtiaz Dharker is a Pakistan-born British poet, artist, and video film maker. She won the Queen's Gold Medal for her English poetry and was appointed Chancellor of Newcastle University from January 2020.
The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance has produced Anthologies for GCSE English and English Literature studied in English schools. This follows on from AQA's predecessor organisations; Northern Examinations and Assessment Board (NEAB) and Southern Examining Group (SEG).
John Agard FRSL is a Guyanese playwright, poet and children's writer, now living in Britain. In 2012, he was selected for the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was awarded BookTrust's Lifetime Achievement Award in November 2021.
"Half-Caste" is a poem by Guyanese poet John Agard that looks at people's ideas and usage of the term "half-caste", a derogatory term for people of multiracial descent. The poem is included within Agard's 2005 collection of the same name, in which he explores a range of issues affecting black and mixed-race identity in the UK. The poem is written in the first-person. Agard uses phonetic spelling throughout the poem, in order to create the voice of the speaker. It was included in the AQA Anthology, and is currently included in the Pearson Edexcel GCSE (9–1) English Literature Poetry Anthology, meaning that many British school pupils study the poem for their GCSE English Literature qualification. A snippet of Agard reading the poem is included in British rapper Loyle Carner’s 2022 single Georgetown, referencing his own mixed-race identity.
Daljit Nagra is a British poet whose debut collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover! – a title alluding to W. H. Auden's Look, Stranger!, D. H. Lawrence's Look! We Have Come Through! and by epigraph also to Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" – was published by Faber in February 2007. Nagra's poems relate to the experience of Indians born in the UK, and often employ language that imitates the English spoken by Indian immigrants whose first language is Punjabi, which some have termed "Punglish". He currently works part-time at JFS School in Kenton, London, and visits schools, universities and festivals where he performs his work. He was appointed chair of the Royal Society of Literature in November 2020. He is a professor of creative writing at Brunel University London.
The Rialto is an independent poetry magazine and poetry publisher. The magazine is published three times a year. It is part-funded by Arts Council England. First published in April 1984 in Norwich, Norfolk. The name was a result of a friend enquiring on "what news on the Rialto?" referring to progress with the publication and is a reference to William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.
The Manchester Poetry Prize is a literary award celebrating excellence in creative writing. It was launched by Carol Ann Duffy and The Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2008, and was the first phase of the annual Manchester Writing Competition. Open internationally to writers aged 16 or over, the Manchester Poetry Prize awards a cash prize of £10,000 to the writer of the best portfolio of poems submitted. In addition, during the 2008 and 2010 Prizes, a bursary for study at MMU was awarded to an entrant aged 18–25 as part of the Jeffrey Wainwright Manchester Young Writer of the Year Award. Entrants are asked to submit a portfolio of poetry. The poems can be on any subject but must be new work, not published elsewhere.
"Last Post" is a poem written by Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, in 2009. It was commissioned by the BBC to mark the deaths of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, two of the last three surviving British veterans from the First World War, and was first broadcast on the BBC Radio 4 programme Today on 30 July 2009, the date of Allingham's funeral.
"Education for Leisure" is a poem by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy which explores the mind of a person who is planning to commit a murder. Until 2008 the poem was studied at GCSE level in England and Wales as part of the AQA Anthology, a collection of poems by modern poets such as Duffy and Seamus Heaney.
"Elvis's Twin Sister" is a poem by Carol Ann Duffy that is said to reflect "the hidden lives of generations of overlooked women" as part of the collection The World's Wife, of 30 similar poems dealing with the female relatives of famous men throughout history. The poem is sometimes studied by schoolchildren in the United Kingdom as part of the AQA syllabus for GCSE English.
Poetry on the Lake is the event founded in 2001 by the director and organizer Gabriel Griffin, the seat is on Isola di San Giulio. Since 2001 Kevin Bailey has co-organised and judged at the annual Poetry on the Lake festival held at Orta San Giulio in Italy, the antique island on Lake Orta, northern Italy. Annual events include the spring international poetry competition and the autumn celebration described by the British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy on the South Bank Show, ITV, 6 December 2009 as: "...perhaps the smallest but possibly the most perfect poetry festival in the world". Events take place on the island, in the square of Orta, on Sacro Monte in the woods around the chapels, in the historic palaces on board ship, in the neighbouring towns and villages: Omegna, Orta, Pella, Varallo, Invorio and Ameno.
The Emirates Airline Festival of Literature is an international literature festival held annually in the United Arab Emirates. The festival is held under the patronage of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, under the auspices of the Emirates Literature Foundation and is run by Ahlam Bolooki. The festival's offices are located within the Dubai International Writers' Centre.