About
What is the Poetry Station?
A freely accessible web-based video channel and portal for poetry – a great idea. But how feasible is it? The English & Media Centre (see below) has been awarded a small grant from Arts Council of England to find out.
We want to:
- exploit the potential of the web to create a rich multi-sensory experience of poetry which includes music, film, and animation, as well as readings by actors and authors.
- bring together diverse and eclectic poetry worlds – from the unpublished world of slams, live events and song writing, to the published, literary and classic traditions of poetry.
- appeal to a really wide audience, from committed poetry readers to those who have felt excluded or haven’t thought poetry is for them.
What is the pilot site?
Through the pilot site we hope to show what might be possible and attract funding to allow us to sustain and further develop The Poetry Station.
The pilot site is now up and running and we want to use it to find out more about who might use and enjoy it, in what ways and how they’d like to see it develop. At the moment, exciting though it is, it’s limited in scope: for example, it relies heavily on poets we have filmed the in past. There’s a lot more we could do and so many more poets to include if we had the money. So that’s our next big task, to find funding.
What you can do – give us your feedback
Tell us what you think of the site.
We need feedback from as many people as possible to help us develop the site and also to show funders and others how it might be used.
Browse, enjoy and tell us whatever strikes you:
- What do you think of it?
- How useable is it?
- What else would you like to see on it?
- Any ideas for poets, poems or features to add.
Contact us by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), or write to The Poetry Station 18 Compton Terrace
London
N1 2UN
A big thank you to the poets who’ve supported us so far
Most of the poets on the pilot site have been filmed by us in the past as part of our work with schools. We are enormously grateful at the pilot stage of the project to all the poets who have given us permission to use these recordings without a fee. To give more of a flavour of what the site will finally offer, we have also included material created by other organisations such as Channel 4, the BBC, YouTube and specialist poetry publishers, Bloodaxe.
Who are we?
The English and Media Centre is a not-for-profit trust offering publications and professional development on all aspects of English teaching for teachers and students of literature, language and media in the UK and abroad.
You can find out more about our work by visiting the Centre website.
