Retropoetics: Four Billion Years of Inspiration

Write from the archival hoard – history as poetic hook.

‘We don’t reproduce the past, we create it’ – Hilary Mantel.

This course invites you to adventure away from personal experience and delve into the treasure chest of history: an inexhaustible storehouse of inspiration with the potential to refresh our outlook and recharge our vocabularies.

Over five sessions we’ll learn how to raid museum collections, plunder literary sources, analyse historical objects and appropriate anecdotes from the past to forge original poetic material. Of course, there’s no such thing as an objective account – which is why the collective past is the ideal starting point for an act of imagination.

With four billion years of planetary history under our feet, and five thousand years of human documentation at our fingertips, we will charter the fascinating and perplexing boundaries of fact and fiction as we ‘try to know things about yesterday that yesterday didn’t know itself’ (Mantel, again). Through exercises and assignments we’ll cover aspects such as spotting a good story, conducting and incorporating historical research, handling narrative and drama, experimenting with point of view and finding a voice (or assuming a voice long since passed).

Along the way we’ll look at the work of a range of writers (including DH Lawrence, Rita Dove, John Keats, Tara Bergin, Miroslav Holub, Elaine Feinstein, Thomas Lux and Kei Miller) who are adept, in different ways, at turning old material into urgent, exciting and timeless poems that speak both to past centuries and centuries to come.

5 fortnightly sessions over 10 weeks, starting XX May 2026. No live chats. Suitable for UK & International students.

Concessions & Accessibility

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. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].

What to Expect

Please check the left hand side of this page for information on how this course works in practice, under the heading ‘Course Style‘. If you’re unsure as to what any of the terms there mean, or if this course is a good fit for you, please visit our What to Expect page which includes some further information on how our courses function.

Image credit: @iamblondfox

About Rebecca Watts View Profile

Rebecca Watts’s debut poetry collection, The Met Office Advises Caution, was published by Carcanet in 2016 and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It also featured in the Guardian and Financial Times ‘Best Books of 2016’ lists and was shortlisted for the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. Her second collection, Red Gloves, was published by Carcanet in 2020 and won a Gladstone’s Library Writers-in-Residence award in 2022. Rebecca lives in Cambridge, where she works as a freelance editor, tutor and Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow.

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