2446 Tutored Retreat Poetry: Reading Spaces with Nii Parkes and Hannah Lowe, Guest Reader Jacob Sam-La Rose

As text on the page, a poem consists of two things – the words we use and the spaces between them. During this week, we want to explore being more deliberate about the wordless element of poems – the spaces. What role do they play, what roles can they play, and how can we be intentional about our use of spaces in poetry – whether in terms of form, syntax or pace?

In truth, there is an element of space (or silence) ALWAYS present in poems. This is because language is abstract and all we are ever doing is reaching for words to approximate what we are experiencing so that we can transfer that experience. Given that it is impossible to transfer that experience wholesale, there is forever a silence, a gap that haunts us. How do we exploit that silence, let it work for us, rather than against us?

Nii Parkes is a Ghanaian-British writer, editor and publisher, who has won acclaim as a children’s author, poet, broadcaster and novelist. He is the author of the poetry chapbooks: eyes of a boy, lips of a man (1999), his début; M is for Madrigal (2004), a selection of seven jazz poems; and Ballast (2009), an imagination of the slave trade by balloon. His novel, Tail of the Blue Bird (Jonathan Cape, 2009), hailed by the Financial Times as ‘a beautifully written fable… simple in form, but grappling with urgent issues,’ was lauded internationally, becoming a bestseller in Germany and notably winning France’s two major prizes for translated fiction – Prix Baudelaire and Prix Laure Bataillon – in 2014. He is also the author of two books for children under the name K.P. Kojo. Nii Ayikwei serves on the boards of World Literature Today and the AKO Caine Prize and has served as a judge for several literature prizes including the Commonwealth Prize, the NSK Neustadt Prize and the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize.

Hannah Lowe is a poet, memoirist and academic. Her latest book, The Kids, a won the Costa Poetry Award and the Costa Book of the Year, 2021. Her first poetry collection Chick (Bloodaxe, 2013) won the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection. In September 2014, she was named as one of 20 Next Generation poets. Her family memoir Long Time, No See (Periscope, 2015) featured as Radio 4’s Book of the Week. She is a Reader in Creative Writing at Brunel University.

Guest Reader

Jacob Sam-La Rose is a poet, facilitator, programme leader, artistic director and poetry editor at flipped eye publishing. He has provided support and mentorship for successive generations of poets through Roundhouse Poets, Barbican Young Poets, the Spoken Word Education programme, Primers (Nine Arches), The Writing Room (Apples & Snakes) and countless other developmental initiatives across the UK, Southeast Asia, Southern Africa and the US. Among other appointments, Jacob has served as the inaugural Poetry Fellow for English Heritage, Poet-in-Residence at Raffles Institution (Singapore), and poetry professor at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His collection Breaking Silence was shortlisted for Fenton Aldeburgh and Forward Poetry prizes and is studied as an A-level set text. His poetry has been translated into Portuguese, Latvian, French and Dutch.