A note on : Photo Pedagogy presents Photo Poetry

Was really happy to contribute to this extraordinary resource on the brilliant Photo Pedagogy project exploring Photo Poetry. https://www.photopedagogy.com/photopoetry.html

The site is for teachers of photography who are happy to share aspects of their practice. The site is about the art (and science) of photography teaching. And what an incredible job Jon Nichols has done with the Photo Poetry section. Really it’s more comprehensive than my resources, which I developed for the Photographer’s Gallery and currently have a 100 slide powerpoint from I subject some students too. It really is worth a dig.

“The term 'photopoetry' and its various alternatives - photopoème, photoetry, photoverse, photo-graffiti etc. - attempts to describe an art form in which the poetry and photography are equally important and, often, directly and symbiotically related…. These correspondences between photography and poetry are brought into sharp relief by photopoetry - specific examples of published collaborations between photographers and poets (sometimes the same person). Writer and artist S. J. Fowler describes the challenge of exploring photopoetry as follows:

To begin, we must ask ourselves what these mediums actually are, at heart, and then what they can be together? Finally, what is the purpose of their combination? What can they do together? And why is it relatively rare to see a cohesive combination of the two - with fidelity to poetry that isn’t just text, or discourse, or opinion, and photography that isn’t just pictorial? 
-- S. J. Fowler

Kingston writing school international pedagogy conference

I gave a off the cuff chit chat paper on the Enemies project and innovation in poetry projects, alongside for more erudite talking by Kim Campanello, James Miller and Fiona Curran, and that was nice, we had a nice audience and a wide ranging chat. Then I went hollywood and went home. Then I returned for a really intimate and enjoyable reading in a lecture theatre in the Galsworthy building of Kingston U. Which is quite modern and clean and new, and like Kingston itself, new to me, and strange. I was one of only two men in a room of about twenty, and so went all dirty magician with my reading, interactively forcing a gentle goose cacophony through the Estates of Westeros book in a box. Saw Philip Gross, Kim Campanello and Jane Yeh read too, having heard of but never seen, all of them. Then I tried to walk the 8 miles home, and got locked in Richmond park in the dark and had to climb into someone's back yard. 

Kingston Writing School 1st International Conference: Pedagogy and Practice: Writing and Higher Education

http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/activities/item.php?updatenum=2496 On Wednesday July 10th I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion on innovative pedagogy in creative writing practise at the 1^st International Kingston Writing School conference in the John Galsworthy building of the Uni’s campus. Should be a really interesting discussion, led by the novelist James Miller. Hanif Kureshi will be there that day too. I’ll be reading that night too at 7.30pm, alongside some interesting poets.