Jo Shapcott

24 March 1953

Standard Name: Shapcott, Jo

Birth Name: Jo Shapcott

JS is a poet of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, who has also published anthologies, verse for music, and a book of critical prose based on a lecture series.

Full profile

Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Anthologization	Elizabeth Jennings	The Leamington Poetry Society published a 4-page leaflet (plus cover) of EJ 's poems, titled with her name, in March 1987. Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true. Twelve years later the British Council published an audiocassette of poetry which features her...
Intertextuality and Influence	Ruth Padel	RP dedicated the volume to her partner Michael Black , but the opening poem and one other are dedicated to Irish poet Matthew Sweeney . Padel, Ruth. Angel. Bloodaxe, 1993. prelims The collection (many of whose contents had appeared, often...
Literary responses	Ruth Padel	Her fellow-poet Jo Shapcott praised the introduction for being a summary of the age as well as of approaches to poetry. Shapcott wrote that she had seen no description of where and who we are...
Literary responses	Elizabeth Bishop	The strength of EB 's influence on British and Irish poetry was variously recognised during the 1980s by Andrew Motion , Seamus Heaney , James Fenton , and Eavan Boland , and during the 1990s...
Occupation	Elizabeth Bishop	After a six-month appointment at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1966, EB went on to teach on and off for years at Harvard and briefly at New York University . Astley, Neil. “Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography; Elizabeth Bishop: Chronology”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, 2002, pp. 175-00. 198, 199, 200
Performance of text	Jackie Kay	She and Jo Shapcott read their poems (together with rising starsJay Bernard and Kayo Chingonyi ) at the Royal Shakespeare Company 's redesigned Swan Theatre at Stratford on 3 December 2010. Uncertainty is Not a Good Dog. 2010. The same month...
Reception	Kathleen Jamie	KJ has said that now, having all the time, money (a two-year grant from the Scottish Arts Council ), and confidence she needs, she feels able to say, I'm a poet and this is what...
Textual Features	Germaine Greer	Women are a minority here, but well represented: Fleur Adcock , Anna Letitia Barbauld , Amy Clampitt , Olive Custance (Lady Alfred Douglas) , Emily Dickinson , Freda Downie , U. A. Fanthorpe , Vicki Feaver
Textual Features	Christine Brooke-Rose	Here CBR 's interest tips strongly away from content towards form, though she acknowledges that an attachment to form that excludes all else is totally withering. Brooke-Rose, Christine. Invisible Author: Last Essays. Ohio State University Press, 2002. 15 For the first time she uses a technique...
Textual Features	Carol Ann Duffy	The sixty poets were each commissioned for a poem marking a particular year. They included Gillian Clarke (1955: Running Away to the Sea), Ruth Fainlight (1963: World Events), Liz Lochhead (1966: Photograph, Art...
Textual Production	Carol Rumens	Since this year, 2007, CR has been picking a Poem of the Week for the Guardian newspaper, which prints the poem along with her commentary and analysis. Rumens like to pay attention to context and...
Textual Production	Jackie Kay	Contributing along with Gillian Clarke , Carol Ann Duffy , Jo Shapcott , Fiona Sampson , and many others, to a collection of poetic responses to Shakespeare four hundred years after his death, JK replied...
Textual Production	Gillian Clarke	GC was one of ten poets gathered by Carol Ann Duffy in spring 2013 to spend two weeks, one in each of ten museums in Cambridge, and to craft a poem relating to the museum...
Textual Production	Wendy Cope	Judging a poetry competition for Mslexia magazine in 2006, WC regretted the small number of poems in traditional forms, and the even smaller number of successful ones. She voiced her disagreement with Jo Shapcott (writing...
Textual Production	Carol Ann Duffy	CAD continued to use her position for the voicing of strong political opinions. On 25 July 2009 The Guardian's Review section opened with three pages of poems on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...

Timeline

January 1986

Poems on the Underground , brainchild of Judith Chernaik , was launched at a ceremony at Aldwych Station. This group arranges the display of single short poems among advertisements in London underground trains.

“London Review Bookshop advertisement”. London Review of Books, Vol.

, No. 18, 24 Sept. 2009, p. 37.

1998-9

In a league table of sales in verse for these years, published by the Guardian in October 2000, Ted Hughes was the highest with 172,174, Seamus Heaney second with 34,690, and Carol Ann Duffy third...

14 May 2013

The Zoological Society of London (better known as the London Zoo ) launched a series of Writers Talks, in which a professuonal writer joined with a scientist and a zoo-keeper to talk about a particular...

Texts

Deane, Nichola. “’Everything a Poet Should Be’: Elizabeth Bishop in Her Letters”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, 2002, pp. 143-58.

Shapcott, Jo. “Confounding Geography”. Contemporary Women’s Poetry: reading/writing/practice, edited by Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones, St Martin’s Press, 2000, pp. 40-6.

Shapcott, Jo. “Confounding Geography”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, 2002, pp. 113-18.

Shapcott, Jo. Electroplating the Baby. Bloodaxe, 1988.

Astley, Neil. “Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography; Elizabeth Bishop: Chronology”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, 2002, pp. 175-00.

Page, Barbara. “Elizabeth Bishop: Stops, Starts and Dreamy Divagations”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, 2002, pp. 12-30.

Shapcott, Jo. Her Book: Poems 1988-1998. Faber and Faber, 2000.

Anderson, Linda. “Introduction”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, 2002, pp. 7-11.

Shapcott, Jo. “Love in the lab”. Guardian Unlimited.

Shapcott, Jo. “Making a Poem”. Mxlexia, No. 38, 2008, p. 22.

Shapcott, Jo. My Life Asleep. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Shapcott, Jo. Of Mutability. Faber and Faber, 2010.

Shapcott, Jo. Phrase Book. Oxford University Press, 1992.

Shapcott, Jo. “Shapcott’s Variation”. Guardian Unlimited.

Shapcott, Jo. Tender Taxes. Faber and Faber, 2001.

Donaghy, Michael. “The Exile’s Accent”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, 2002, pp. 119-22.

Stevenson, Anne. “The Geographical Mirror”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, 2002, pp. 31-41.

Anderson, Linda. “The Story of the Eye: Elizabeth Bishop and the Limits of the Visual”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, 2002, pp. 159-74.

Shapcott, Jo. The Transformers. Bloodaxe, 2003.

Shapcott, Jo. “Women’s Poetry Competition 2005”. Mslexia, Vol.

, 2005, pp. 31-2.

Rees-Jones, Deryn. “Writing ELIZABETH”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, 2002, pp. 42-62.