Wild Court is an international online poetry journal based in the English Department of King’s College London, and named for an alley opposite the Virginia Woolf Building, which houses the English Department. In the nineteenth century, Wild Court alley was an Irish slum, a ‘rookery’ where no policeman dared venture. A short distance away is the Fleet Street window where the Irish poet W.B. Yeats saw a fountain in a shop-window and was inspired to write his poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. You never know where a glance in a London window will take you and Wild Court celebrates poetry’s reach and connectivity. Wild Court’s Advisory Board includes writers, editors and critics from the UK, India and the USA.
Wild Court is committed to publishing a diverse range of poets and essayists and supports the Statement of Solidarity for BAME Students from the Department of English at King’s College London. We aim to reflect the diversity not only of the King’s student community, but of the UK and the wider world.
Wild Court draws on an international community of poets, writers and critics, and publishes the winning entries in the annual Cosmo Davenport-Hines Poetry Prize. Wild Court also supports a series of free public readings at King’s which highlights poetry’s power to connect with other disciplines, and areas of life.
Editor:
Robert Selby
Patrons:
Maureen Duffy, Ed Byrne, Jo Shapcott
Advisory Board:
Hannah Crawforth, Joshua Davies, Sasha Dugdale, Parisa Ebrahimi, Lavinia Greenlaw, Robert Hampson, Ranjit Hoskote, Anthony Joseph, Alberto Manguel, Alan Marshall, Ruth Padel, Alan Read, Christopher Reid, Luke Roberts, Benedict Schofield, Elizabeth Scott-Bauman, Vijay Sheshadri, Arundhathi Subramaniam
Look up to catch eclipses, gold leaf, comets, angels, chandeliers, out of the corner of your eye
Jo Shapcott ‘Of Mutability’
Light sparkles off tiny insects/ floating on the mirrored water
Ed Byrne ‘Trout At Dawn’
Who are those people who walk about in my dreams as if they owned the space?
Maureen Duffy ‘Songs for Sappho’