Voiced Up! Finding Your Poetic Voice
Challenge and choice in developing your voice.
* This course will take place on the video-conferencing platform ZOOM *
How do we find our poetic voice? Is this particular to us or are we all part of a culture, related to our time and place? How is our language determined and in what ways does this develop with and through others? What influences help or hinder this development in our writing? In this engaging and interactive workshop, there will be space to consider these issues.
To find our voices – our unique poetic voices, to write in and from – we will work together through exercises and shared reading. We will start off by exploring the early development of poetic genius in Heaney’s Prose writing before moving to more modern-day work touching on contemporary issues, such as in Roger Robinson’s poetry and recent work by Vanessa Kisuule.
Our voices as poets matter – how are they formed and nurtured? This challenge will help us to think about next steps in our poetic practice, integrating our own stories into our writing – a shared purpose for all poets. This time together will provide participants space to collaborate in shared writing exercises and discussion, asking how we might further develop our writing towards stronger, more integrated creativity – and voice!
1 x 2.5-hour session, running 2–4.30pm (BST), on 12 April 2025. This course will take place on the video-conferencing platform ZOOM.
To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. More information about how our Video Courses work can be found on the Video Courses page. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].
Image credit:Yoel J Gonzalez
About Kaz Reeves 
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Kaz Reeves has developed as a tutor from a year in the Southbank New Poets Collective, 2023- 2024; consolidating and integrating with previous years of work and study. Kaz writes both narrative pieces, focussed on contemporary political issues of peace and justice; as well as more lyrical poems which develop personal and themes in the natural world.
As a grandmother, mother and through work in leadership as a priest in parish communities and hospital chaplaincies, Kaz is open to those of all faiths and none, is a learner of the diverse richness in spiritual life. She has an especial enjoyment of the African diaspora communities to which she owes so much, in more recent work, over the last 15 years. Being brought up in foster care, she has been able to work through a passion for children’s wellbeing, loving most of the challenge of former work in community health and women’s mental health. For her, the personal and political come together in her work in poetry.
Engagement in community projects over the last forty years means poetry for her is therefore an engagement in community as much as an individual experience, voicing interests in writing for the Asylum Journal and The Coracle, and other publications in collaboration, most recently for Amnesty International on their 2025 commission for their Art Rights Truth Project, with a Collective of artist/activists.
She is an accomplished performer and enjoys collaborative poetic experiences, recently performing at the Southbank for the National Poetry Library Open Day. The piece, A Portrait Sitting, was after a work by Roger Robinson, following concerns about the final Grenfell Inquiry.
She is constructing her website-kazpoet.com and hopes to welcome you there very soon!
"I live in southwest Germany where the literary scene is pretty quiet. There are not a lot of classes or opportunities for me to learn, especially in English. Finding the Poetry School has been really valuable and I am always impressed at the range of programs offered."
The Lyrical Eye
Getting from A to B: The Poetry of Scraps
Serving Looks: The Poetics of Clothing