Sharp Things for Rethinkdaily

Sharp Things is a podcast series arranged by Window for sony-nominated podcast station Rethinkdaily. We have now produced two series featuring short stories by new writers, which you can download on itunes or listen to through the website.

Our most recent series features stories from Sion Scott-Wilson, Tania Hershman, Peter Ward, Liam Tullberg, Dave Pickering, Heather Taylor, Jenny Adamthwaite, Mac Dunlop, Peter Brown, Dan Scott, Chris Grollman, David Gaffney, Daniel Gent and Holly Howitt.

Read More »»

Poetry Poppers!

In August 2007, we went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and left a poetry popper anywhere we could find an empty surface. Poetry poppers work just like party poppers, only instead of streamers, you get a burst of glitter and a haiku.


We're certainly not finished with poetry poppers, and we intend to make and distribute many more in the future. Production is time consuming though and we will need to refine the process a bit before they can be truly successful. Watch this space!

Read More »»

Billy Collins Animations

JWT-NY have produced a number of animated films to accompany the wonderful poetry of Billy Collins. If you enjoy these ones, you can find even more here.

Read More »»

Rewriting the Classics

This was an idea we had when we first created Window, but honestly, we’ve had neither the time nor the inclination since then. The idea was to tweak classic poems to make them more relevant to the world as we know it today. The only poem we actually did this to was Funeral Blues by W H Auden. Comments when we originally posted it suggested that we hadn’t changed enough to make it worthwhile. This, though, had always been our intention. It’s a poem we like and respect; we just wanted to clip it a bit and slightly modernise the style. This was our version:

.
Stop all the clocks, make me forget time,
cut off all the telephone lines.

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum,
bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
scribbling on the sky He is Dead.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
my working week and my Sunday rest,
my noon, my midnight, my talk, my song.

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one.
Pack up the moon, dismantle the sun;
pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

Nothing now can come to any good.

Adapted from W H Auden: Funeral Blues by Jenny Adamthwaite and David Pickering.



We also researched other people who had developed classic poetry for modern times, such as Carla Bruni, who had fitted some to music, and Patti Smith who was inspired to write My Blakean Year by the writings of William Blake.

We also found this rather peculiar version of Wordsworth’s I wandered Lonely as Cloud by M C Nuts:



‘Rewriting the Classics’ is an idea we may come back to in the future, but for now we will leave the classics where they are and concentrate on writing our own words in our own way.

Read More »»