School of Night : Poetry with Eric Langley

The School of Night – inspired by the group which included Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh – is our Year Round Poetry Festival. Curated with the help of Don Paterson we have played host to poets as varied as Paul Muldoon, Sam Riviere, Karen Solie, Simon Armitage, Annie Freud, Glyn Maxwell and Liz Lochhead.

The School of Night is anchored to a monthly Tuesday night fixture and offers the chance to explore and discuss the work of some of the best poets on the contemporary scene – three of the shortlisted poets on both the 2015 and 2016 T S Eliot Prizes have been School of Nighters, so we feel quite confident in saying this is one of the most exciting Poetry series in the UK.

For April’s festivities our headliner will be Carcanet’s Eric Langley, celebrating the publication of his first collection Raking Light. An experimental poet, Eric’s latest work explores the relationship between place and identity. In the words of fellow School of Nighter, the critically acclaimed Adam Crothers “Many great poems seem more than the apparent sum of their parts. I find Eric Langley exciting because his poems as wholes are precisely made up of their visible or audible pieces, and because there’s pride in every cog and switch and pin, every stress and rhyme and repetition boldly displayed. It’s like watching Penn and Teller or Derren Brown explain a magic trick”. We too find Eric’s writing hugely exciting – we can’t wait to hear from him first hand.

Dr Eric Langley has taught at the Universities of Leeds, York, Royal Holloway, our own University of St Andrews and UCL, and Oxford University Press published his monograph on Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare. He is the son of award-winning poet R.F. Langley who died in 2011.