David's prose poetry adventure 2024
On my journey into the heart of prose poetry in 2024 I am lucky enough to have a brilliant set of expert mentors to guide me. So subject to my funding application being successful, I will be working with:
Dr Vik Shirley
Vik Shirley is a poet, writer, editor and academic from Bristol now living in Edinburgh. Her collection, The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN), her pamphlets, Corpses (Sublunary Editions), Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse (Beir Bua) and Poets (The Red Ceilings Press), and her book of photo-poetry Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock) were all published 2020-2022. Her work has appeared in such places as Poetry London, The Rialto, Magma, 3am Magazine, Tentacular, The Indianapolis Review, Perverse and Tears in the Fence. A Poetry School tutor, teaching on the Surreal Narrative and the Grotesque in Poetry, she has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal from the University of Birmingham (where her supervisor was Luke Kennard). Vik is Associate Editor of Sublunary Editions and Co-Editor of Surreal-Absurd for Mercurius magazine. Her chthonic sequel to Corpses, Notes on the Underworld, will be published by Sublunary Editions in Autumn, 2023.
Dr Carrie Etter
Dr Carrie Etter is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Bristol and has published four collections of poetry, most recently The Weather in Normal (UK: Seren; US: Station Hill, 2018), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her essays on prose poetry have been published in The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century (Nine Arches, 2019), Poetry News, Poetry Review, and elsewhere, and individual poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, The TLS, and many other journals and anthologies internationally.
Dr Tom Jenks
Tom Jenks’ recent books are Rhubarb (Beir Bua Press, 2021), a collection of poetry and short prose and Pack My Box With Five Dozen Liquor Jugs (Penteract Press, 2021), a collaborative Oulipian novel with Catherine Vidler. Other publications include four with if p then q press: A Priori (2008), * (2010), Items (2013) and, in 2018, A Long and Hard Night Troubled by Visions, a collection of short prose and conceptual poetry. Other conceptual works include An Anatomy of Melancholy (Sad Press, 2016), which re-writes Robert Burton’s 17th century work The Anatomy of Melancholy using Twitter and The Tome of Commencement (Stranger Press, 2014), which is a snyonmical translation of The Book of Genesis facilitated by Microsoft Excel, selections from which appeared in The Penguin Book of Oulipo (2019), edited by Philip Terry. Selections from Spruce (Blart Books, 2015) appeared in The Best British Poetry, edited by Emily Berry. In 2017, he wrote and performed in Crabtree: the Libretto, a commission by Manchester Opera Project, with an accompanying book published by The Red Ceilings Press. He also produces visual works, most recently creative text visualisations based on letter and word frequency in classic texts. Some of his visual work appeared in The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Hayward Publishing, 2015), edited by Kenneth Goldsmith, Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe. He edits the small press zimzalla, specialising in literary objects and co-organised the long running Other Room experimental poetry reading series in Manchester.
Dr Ian Seed
As well as tutoring in Creative Writing, he has lectured in Italian language and literature. He is a poet, critic, fiction writer, editor and translator He has read at a number of events and venues, for example: The Anthony Burgess Foundation (Manchester), Dove Cottage (Grasmere), Enoteca Letteraria (Rome), Lancaster Litfest, Liverpool Blue Coat Arts Centre, The Manchester Writing School, Rose Theatre (Edge Hill), Sedbergh Literature Festival, The Storyhouse (Chester), and Swedenborg Hall (London) Ian has published a number of collections of poetry and prose, including The Underground Cabaret (Shearsman, 2020), New York Hotel (Shearsman, 2018), which was selected by Mark Ford as a TLS Book of the Year, and Identity Papers (Shearsman, 2016), which was showcased on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. His most recent essay is ‘Writing the Prose Poem: An Insider’s Perspective on an Outsider Artform’, in Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice, eds Anne Caldwell and Oz Hardwick (Routledge, 2022) His work is featured in a number of anthologies, including The Best British Poetry 2014, ed. Mark Ford (Salt, 2014), The Forward Book of Poetry 2017, eds Liz Berry, Don Share, George Szirtes and Tracey Thorn (Faber & Faber, 2016), The Best Small Fictions 2017, ed. Amy Hempel (Braddock Avenue Books, 2017), and The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry, eds Anne Caldwell and Oz Hardwick (Valley Press, 2019). He is Assistant Director of the International Flash Fiction Association (IFFA), a member of the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE), and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
As well as tutoring in Creative Writing, he has lectured in Italian language and literature. He is a poet, critic, fiction writer, editor and translator He has read at a number of events and venues, for example: The Anthony Burgess Foundation (Manchester), Dove Cottage (Grasmere), Enoteca Letteraria (Rome), Lancaster Litfest, Liverpool Blue Coat Arts Centre, The Manchester Writing School, Rose Theatre (Edge Hill), Sedbergh Literature Festival, The Storyhouse (Chester), and Swedenborg Hall (London) Ian has published a number of collections of poetry and prose, including The Underground Cabaret (Shearsman, 2020), New York Hotel (Shearsman, 2018), which was selected by Mark Ford as a TLS Book of the Year, and Identity Papers (Shearsman, 2016), which was showcased on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. His most recent essay is ‘Writing the Prose Poem: An Insider’s Perspective on an Outsider Artform’, in Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice, eds Anne Caldwell and Oz Hardwick (Routledge, 2022) His work is featured in a number of anthologies, including The Best British Poetry 2014, ed. Mark Ford (Salt, 2014), The Forward Book of Poetry 2017, eds Liz Berry, Don Share, George Szirtes and Tracey Thorn (Faber & Faber, 2016), The Best Small Fictions 2017, ed. Amy Hempel (Braddock Avenue Books, 2017), and The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry, eds Anne Caldwell and Oz Hardwick (Valley Press, 2019). He is Assistant Director of the International Flash Fiction Association (IFFA), a member of the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE), and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.