Exploring Beauty & Frictions of Identity Through Place
Location, Location, Location – scouting the power of poetics where we are.
Place differs from space, for it has been defined by human ideas, emotions, and experiences. This provides a rich asset to draw on and address the happenings of our lives and those around us. Beyond description, poems of place can echo our desires and frustrations, they are a vehicle to carry memory and possibilities. In this course we will explore layered approaches to including place in our poems and consider ways to elevate our engagement with it.
How does peace co-exist with disruption? Or happiness with longing? We’ll look at place poems that contain these dualities, as this is the reality of our existence. Through careful reading and exercises we will uncover different techniques to knit our poems. There are also places that shape our daily lives, the way we move, and intimately connect with those around us. To delve into this, we will examine our relationships through the places that conjure and carry them. By looking at these places as more than rooms, they become symbols we can play with and thereby create more complex work.
Studying writers far and wide, there will be poems from Liz Berry, Wallace Stevens, Ladan Osman, Carl Sandburg, Hannah Lowe, and more. Here are poems set in kitchens, living rooms, cities, estates, volcanoes, and those where characters roam in search of what could be, or what once was. Beyond literal locations, we’ll also look at seasons of life as a place we exist in. Is age a place, is parenthood a place?
Through this course we’ll interrogate the places we connect with, remember them, forget them, invent them, and juxtapose them. The aim is to write poems that offer new perspectives on the human condition.
5 fortnightly sessions over 10 weeks, starting 29 September 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: @Cottonbro Studio
About Theresa Lola 
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Theresa Lola is a poet and author of two poetry collections. A poem from her first book In Search of Equilibrium is studied in the UK’s OCR GCSE syllabus. While her second poetry collection Ceremony for the Nameless won the 2025 Derek Walcott Poetry Prize. She holds an MSt in Creative Writing from University of Oxford, and has held poetry residencies at Wellcome Collection, Dulwich Picture Gallery, and Bethlem Museum of the Mind. Lola has worked on commissions for The National Gallery, Selfridges, Nest New York, and Rimowa.
"The Poetry School has become like my secret elixir that I take a spoonful of when I need some nourishment and inspiration."
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