Fontasia: Poetry & Rebellious Typography
Breaking type – poetry that confounds the printers.
How does the appearance of poetic text on the page affect its reception? What happens when type is used as imagery, or is debased, or redacted? How does meaning shift when text is found and imported into a new environment, or when the rules of grammar, spacing and punctuation are broken?
In this workshop, we’ll seek answers to these questions by exploring poetry of typographical innovation from poets including George Herbert, ee cummings, Mary Ruefle, Queneau, Tom Phillips and Kei Miller. Our whistle-stop tour of rebellious typography will include found poetry, redaction, erasure, erosion, concrete poetry, code poetry, and typography as notation. Instead of the usual workshop ‘writing time’, be prepared to get crafty: we will take up scissors, paste, and markers to find new meaning in existing works. Participants will return to the second session with poems of their own written and designed using some of these techniques, allowing us to see what happens to our work when we unleash the power of disruption.
1 x full day session & 1 x half-day session, running 10.30am–4.30pm (BST) on 24 Oct & 10.30am – 1pm (GMT) on 7 Nov 2026. Sessions for this course will take place at Holborn House Community Centre, 35 Emerald Street, London, WC1N 3QW.
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, then please take a look at our What to Expect page which includes some further information on how our courses function.
Image credit: @heather-green
About Lydia Kennaway 
View Profile
Lydia Kennaway is Poet-in-Residence at Thin Ice Press where she is collaborating on a letterpress edition of The Marker Committee, an artist’s book of poems about the written word and deep time. Together with her own linocut illustrations, the book plays with folded paper and forms of type – mudlarked, vandalised, or dot matrix-printed – to comment on our abiding urge to leave our mark.
"What the Poetry School offers is invaluable because us poets must never stop learning; there is always more to know, read, write and share, plus quality feedback is priceless."
The Poetic Engine: Working With, Through, & Against Form
Beyond Ekphrasis: Encounters with Poetry & Visual Art
Broken Open: Experimenting with Erasure, Fragmentation, Visual, & Translingual Poetry