Poems Behaving Badly: The Joy of Being Wrong on Purpose
Get into seriously playful poetic forms at the experimental edge.
Lists, instructions, manuals, YouTube videos, cereal boxes, newspapers, interviews, reports, jokes, anecdotes, legal documents, menus, soap opera dialogue, social media posts, internet searches, crosswords, wordsearches, bubble gum packets. Poetry can be found in the strangest of places.
If you’re itching to move on from traditional ideas of poetry, its standard forms and rhymes, and are tired of writing about well-traversed topics in the same old way, this could be the course for you. During this ten-week experimental journey, we will break free of all expectations of what poetry is and what it should be and play as we’ve never played before!
Working with such texts as The Penguin Book of Oulipo, Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, The Oulipo Puzzle Book, Nicky Melville’s The Imperative Commands, Tom Jenks’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, CA Conrad’s Ecodeviance: (soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, we will write erasure poems, collage poems, prose poems, surreal-absurd poems, conceptual poems, ritual poems, spell poems, found poems, process-driven poems and more!
On this subversive and immersive Poetry School course, we will be expanding the scope of poetry, exciting our minds, and revolutionising our writing with some serious play!
5 fortnightly sessions over 10 weeks, starting 5 May 2025. No live chats. Suitable for UK & International students.
Concessions & Accessibility
To apply for a concessionary rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected]. For more information visit our Online Courses page.
Image credit: @omilaev
About Vik Shirley 
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Vik Shirley is a poet, writer, editor and educator from Bristol now living in Edinburgh. Her books include Corpses (Sublunary Editions), Notes from the Underworld (Sublunary Editions), Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock), One by One (No Press), Poets (The Red Ceilings), Strangers Wave (zimZalla), The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN) and Cassette Poems (above/ground press). Her most recent publication is Some Deer (Broken Sleep) and her next full-length collection, Nervous Tic (Sublunary Editions), is due for publication in Autumn 2025. Vik’s work has appeared in Poetry London, PN Review, The Rialto, Magma, Gutter and Dreaming Awake: New and Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom (MadHat Press). A regular performer at the European Poetry Festival, Vik is a Poetry School Tutor (teaching on themes including the surreal narrative, absurdism and the grotesque). She co-edits Firmament online and Surreal-Absurd at Mercurius. Vik has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from the University of Birmingham.
"Dr Vik Shirley is an inspirational poetry teacher. She a deep knowledge of poetry and is inclusive, encouraging and her style of teaching enables and encourages you to feel free to be yourself and write what you must."
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