A Cloud in Trousers: Emotional Intensification Through Distance 

Explore what "distance" really means and how it can actually intensify, rather than diminish, feeling in your poems.

* This course will take place on the video-conferencing platform ZOOM *

“If you prefer, / I’ll be pure raging meat, / or if you prefer, / as the sky changes tone, / I’ll be absolutely tender, / not a man, but a cloud in trousers!” – Vladimir Mayakovsky 

We tend to assume that a poem moves us most when it speaks directly, when feeling is named, confessed, transmitted from speaker to reader. This session begins from the opposite premise: it looks at poems in which distance does not diminish feeling but intensifies it, redistributing the labour of emotion so that the reader becomes its co-producer rather than its recipient.

Drawing on ideas of defamiliarisation, estrangement and poetic artifice, we’ll explore what “distance” actually means in a poem and discover that it isn’t a single thing. A poem can hold us at arm’s length through the voice of its speaker, through the visible workings of its form, syntax, and framing, through the way it interrupts habitual perception, or through the flatness and everyday language that hold feeling at an examinable distance. Distance can also become an ethical and political tactic, as in counter-archival and documentary poetics. Each kind of distance does something different, slowing the reader down so that emotion can be examined, released, and felt anew.

We’ll read closely across a range of twentieth and twenty-first century practices, drawing on work by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Rosmarie Waldrop, M. NourbeSe Philip, Layli Long Soldier, Araki Yasusada, Anne Boyer, Juliana Spahr, Wayne Holloway-Smith, Holly Pester, Arda Collins, Lucy Ives, Andrew Durbin and Diana Hamilton.

The session combines close reading with conceptual framing, inviting participants to identify how different poetic techniques generate distinct kinds of emotional experience and how these strategies might be activated in their own work through short exercises.

1-off Zoom session at 6.30–9.00pm (BST on Thursday 3rd September)

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.

What to Expect

This course is part of The September Sessions: 10 Years of the MA in Writing in Poetry, a series of Zoom workshops celebrating 10 Years of our MA in Writing in Poetry programme. Check out the full line up 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: Şeyma Eraslan

About Iulia David View Profile

Iulia David holds MAs in Performance and Culture (Goldsmiths) and Writing Poetry (the Poetry School and Newcastle University). Her poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Prototype, Propel, Magma, and The Scores. Her debut pamphlet Blueprint was published by Green Bottle Press in 2022. She is currently working on her first collection. 

"It’s a very safe space to experiment, the feedback is very thoughtful which points to how work can be developed going forward. The course will continue to have an impact on my writing and wider creative work."

- Spring 2026 Survey Response

The Poetry School