The pivot of my conversation with Sheffield poet Helen Mort is on balancing writing about public events with reflecting on private experience. We are speaking three days after the start of the second set of inquests into the 1989 Hillsborough stadium tragedy, ordered by the High Court in December 2012 when it quashed the original verdicts on […]
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This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date. OCA creative writing student Josephine Edge has enjoyed poetry all her life but until last October, had never seriously attempted to write it. She worked on two poems last year when she was studying the OCA […]
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This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date. OCA tutor Csilla Toldy’s first collection of poetry, ‘Red Roots – Orange Sky’, was launched in Belfast at the end of June. Student Christine Gutsell, who is currently studying Writing 2: Poetry and Form, talked to Csilla […]
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Lovelorn, partnered, married, happily single: this week, it’s hard to avoid the tacky manifestations that now accompany the annual celebration – or commiseration – that is Valentine’s Day.
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Major movements forward in the development of poetic form have often been achieved by abandoning accepted conventions. The Romantic poets’ parting with the heroic couplet and Walt Whitman’s no-rhyme, free-verse revolution are two examples. Vision and courage propel creative change, and artists working in many forms learn from what preceded them. Degas and Renoir were […]
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OCA has broken with convention by appointing a religious studies scholar as its new curriculum lead for creative writing. Northern Irish essayist and poet Chris Arthur has a background in religious studies, first as an undergraduate and postgraduate at Edinburgh University and subsequently at Lampeter University, where he taught for more than 20 years. Fellow Irish writer Patrick O’Sullivan has credited him with ‘rescuing the meditative essay for the twenty-first century’.
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Katya from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo. Pat Borthwick, poet and creative writing tutor was in the office this week so we took the opportunity to record her reading Katya from her recent collection Admiral FitzRoy’s Barometer. Katya was the winner of an Amnesty International award in 2005.
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