Summer School 2012
The 8th Tower Poetry Summer School for young poets aged 18-23 will be held in Christ Church, Oxford from 28-31 August 2012. The tutors will be Alan Gillis (University of Edinburgh, Scotland) and Kevin Young (Emory University, Atlanta, USA).
Tower Poetry,
Christ Church,
Oxford, OX1 1DP
Tel: 01865 286591
or contact us >
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Chloe Stopa-Hunt Introduction
Chloe Stopa-Hunt was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2003 and 2004. She read English at New College, Oxford, and won the English Poem on a Sacred Subject Prize 2010. Her poems have appeared in various magazines, including Magma and Oxford Poetry, and she has reviewed for Asymptote, Poetry Matters, and The Oxonian Review.
Four of her poems appear in The Twelve - poems from the Tower Poetry Summer School 2010 – and she introduces her three new poems as follows: September Massacre
This poem is set in 1792, at the height of the French Revolution, and examines one day in the royal family's long imprisonment (during which they really did play board games). Some details, however, are wholly my invention. I like to use the fluid second person in historical pieces; it is less narrow than the first person, but still intimate. In this poem, I found couplets a useful device, imposing formal restraint on a piece which addresses the difficult topic of a cruel murder: the Princesse de Lamballe was killed simply for refusing to renounce her loyalty to the King and Queen, no other crime. Witch Trial
I translated some poems by Catherine Pozzi (1882-1934) in 2010, and became interested in her story. She led an unusual life for a Frenchwoman, even spending a year studying at St Hugh's College, Oxford; she is most famous for her affair with Paul Valéry, but her poems and journals are fascinating in their own right. My poem reflects on some of the chief themes in her writing, and alludes specifically to "Vale", a piece composed during a train journey and under the influence of heavy opiates (taken to alleviate the pain of tuberculosis). To Catherine Pozzi
This poem is set in 1792, at the height of the French Revolution, and examines one day in the royal family's long imprisonment (during which they really did play board games). Some details, however, are wholly my invention. I like to use the fluid second person in historical pieces; it is less narrow than the first person, but still intimate. In this poem, I found couplets a useful device, imposing formal restraint on a piece which addresses the difficult topic of a cruel murder: the Princesse de Lamballe was killed simply for refusing to renounce her loyalty to the King and Queen, no other crime. September Massacre
Following her death, the Princesse de Lamballe's hair was dressed, and her head brought to Marie Antoinette on a pike. Rioters urged the queen to kiss her favourite's lips. i. The thin white checker warming in your hand, soaked to move – usually winning. An easy, no-stakes starts, everyone's hands wax of slamming shutters: which is not the custom, When you're inside, no chant is clearly audible. Later ii. Not looking down might have been worse what you want to know. You've come to see and the hair is, in one sense, just dressing the dead. Still, and sodden iris – was it renewed, along © Chloe Stopa-Hunt, 2011
Witch Trial
Finding my way home at dusk a camellia reek Even in the lush white pool © Chloe Stopa-Hunt, 2011
To Catherine Pozzi
Twentieth-century French metaphysical poet and a lover of Ever you would the sullen blooms on altars at nothings, vanishings, the shape of joy is Elsewhere (these maps tell such bare-faced lies), medical veins Painkillers, (in your poems he's often vous) © Chloe Stopa-Hunt, 2011
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