Open Workshop with Richard Osmond: ‘Written in Juice of Lemon’

Content and form should always be in dialogue. In this new Open Workshop with up-and-coming poet, Richard Osmond, you’ll make this dialogue more explicit, and take it to strange new places.

In this workshop you’ll be looking at poems which are designed to be published, broadcast or inscribed in unconventional ways, on unconventional surfaces or through unconventional media – on buildings, as graffiti, tapped out in morse code, recorded in binary or beamed into space. Examples include Sidney’s sonnet ‘Do not disdain, O straight upraised pine’ (which is carved into a tree by Pamela in the Old Arcadia, and uses tree-qualities as tropes to consider love, pain and virtue), and ‘Written in Juice of Lemon’ by Abraham Cowley (a fiery love poem written in invisible ink that must be heated over flames to be read, eventually causing it to catch fire).

You’ll then be asked to think of an unusual way of sending a poem into the world and, more importantly, to write a poem which is fully aware of the uniqueness of its form and thoughtfully participates in it. The poem should, as the examples do, explore the possibilities offered by its particular non-conventional form.  A poem written on rice paper, for example, to be shredded and thrown as confetti, could paradoxically consider marriage in the context of disintegration, or explore celebration in terms of the transience or permanence of memory.

Feel up to the challenge? Apply now to avoid disappointment…

Title: ‘Written in Juice of Lemon’

OPEN WORKSHOP STARTS – Friday 17 October 2014

POEM SUBMISSION DEADLINE – Friday 24 October 2014

LIVE CHAT – Wednesday 29 October 2014, 7-9pm GMT

To book your place, please email [email protected]

Note: places are given on a first-come first-served basis, but priority may be given to first-time students.

Richard Osmond’s poetry has been published in a range of books and journals, including Salt Publications’ Best British Poetry anthologies, The Dark Horse and N+1. His two debut pamphlets were published in April 2014 by HappenStance. One, Shill, is in contemporary voice and style, though not completely. The other, Variant Air, revisits the mode and style of Gerard Manley Hopkins, though not… completely. He is currently working on his first full length collection. He is also co-editor of 13 Pages, a boutique poetry press. Their latest book, The Mimic Octopus, is a richly-illustrated anthology of poetic imitation by leading and emerging poets. By day, Richard works as a forager, hunting for wild plants, fruits and fungi in the forests and hedgerows of Hertfordshire.

Open Workshops runs a free writing workshop every month, open to all CAMPUS members, ranging from practical exercises, technical masterclasses, to new and experimental approaches to making poetry.