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Home » Online

Online Courses

Learn poetry anywhere in the world

Our online programme of poetry courses and workshops makes learning poetry accessible to everyone, all from the comfort of your kitchen table. We offer online courses three terms a year and free learning activities all year round, both via CAMPUS, our social network for poets, giving you access at any time, from any place.

Year on year, we offer one of the largest programmes of online poetry courses in the world, covering a huge array of subjects and techniques, and available to you with as little as an Internet connection. Much like our face-to-face teaching, each online course is facilitated by one of our experienced tutors, who will provide quality writing assignments, reading material and personalised feedback on your poems, but in this instance, all via a virtual classroom.

Up to a fifth of all our online course students are based outside of the UK, from America and Canada to India, Germany, Singapore, Mexico, Uzbekistan and Australia. And the majority of our online courses are suitable to all levels of poets, employing a peer-to-peer model of education that draws strength from the diversity of voices from our students across the globe.

All our Online Courses

The Confessional Studio £118.00 * Tutor: Nisha Bhakoo

The Confessional Studio

True Confessions – revisiting the confessional canon and bringing the personal into your own poetics.

Start Date: September 21, 2026
End Date: October 19, 2026 ( 29 Days )
Type: Online
Dissolving Polarities with Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge Masterclass Sold Out! Tutor: Agnieszka Studzinska

Dissolving Polarities with Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge Masterclass

Against closure – writing like you’re not sure if you mean it.

Start Date: September 21, 2026
End Date: December 14, 2026 ( 85 Days )
Type: Online
Into Greater Fields of Possibility Masterclass £290.00 * Tutor: Zakia Carpenter-Hall

Into Greater Fields of Possibility Masterclass

There’s a lot happening globally – but let’s not give up on the world just yet.

Start Date: September 22, 2026
End Date: December 15, 2026 ( 85 Days )
Type: Online
Line Dancing for Poets Masterclass £290.00 * Tutor: Carrie Etter

Line Dancing for Poets Masterclass

Poetry and the line – poetic lineation for the nation.

Start Date: September 23, 2026
End Date: December 16, 2026 ( 85 Days )
Type: Online
Plastic Language: Poetry on Record Masterclass £290.00 * Tutor: Will Rene

Plastic Language: Poetry on Record Masterclass

Now that’s what I call sound poetry – expand your poetic mind with a joyful guided listen to the best of sonic poetry.

Start Date: September 25, 2026
End Date: December 18, 2026 ( 85 Days )
Type: Online
Exploring Beauty & Frictions of Identity Through Place £160.00 * Tutor: Theresa Lola

Exploring Beauty & Frictions of Identity Through Place

Location, Location, Location – scouting the power of poetics where we are.

Start Date: September 29, 2026
End Date: December 8, 2026 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
BECOMING: Transreading Interspecies Empathy & Innovative Poetics £160.00 * Tutor: Camilla Nelson

BECOMING: Transreading Interspecies Empathy & Innovative Poetics

Get inspired by nonhuman ways of Being to create innovative, more-than human poetic work.

Start Date: September 29, 2026
End Date: December 8, 2026 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Prose for Poets, Poets for Prose Sold Out! Tutor: Rachel Bower

Prose for Poets, Poets for Prose

Explore how the world of prose can offer fresh new perspectives on your poetry and vice versa.

Start Date: September 30, 2026
End Date: December 9, 2026 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Fortnightly Feedback with Natalie Whittaker £118.00 * Tutor: Natalie Whittaker

Fortnightly Feedback with Natalie Whittaker

Knock loose poems into shape with some concentrated feedback from poet, editor, and tutor, Natalie Whittaker.

Start Date: September 30, 2026
End Date: December 16, 2026 ( 78 Days )
Type: Online
Tell Me About a Complicated Man: Transreading the Odyssey £160.00 * Tutor: Stav Poleg

Tell Me About a Complicated Man: Transreading the Odyssey

Re-imagine Homer's cast of Olympians, sea-monsters, Lotus Eaters, and mere humans with Emily Wilson’s ground-breaking translation.

Start Date: October 1, 2026
End Date: December 10, 2026 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Into the Gaps: Folklore as a Vehicle for Poetry £160.00 * Tutor: Kym Deyn

Into the Gaps: Folklore as a Vehicle for Poetry

Once upon a poem, making your own mythologies poetic as folk.

Start Date: October 2, 2026
End Date: December 11, 2026 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Fragility of the Gods £135.00 * Tutor: Zena Edwards

Fragility of the Gods

A Mythopoetic course exploring Archetypal Gods as inspiration for your own poems!

Start Date: October 5, 2026
End Date: December 14, 2026 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Broken Open: Experimenting with Erasure, Fragmentation, Visual, & Translingual Poetry £160.00 * Tutor: Melanie Hyo-In Han

Broken Open: Experimenting with Erasure, Fragmentation, Visual, & Translingual Poetry

Making space – poetry of the experimental, visual, and multi-lingual.

Start Date: October 6, 2026
End Date: December 15, 2026 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Poetry of the Displaced £160.00 * Tutor: Olha Shvets

Poetry of the Displaced

Distance makes the poetry grow stronger – writing yourself back home.

Start Date: October 6, 2026
End Date: December 15, 2026 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Writing Beyond the Self: Memoir, Consciousness, & Literary Voice Sold Out! Tutor: Charlotte Northall

Writing Beyond the Self: Memoir, Consciousness, & Literary Voice

Writing away from convention and towards making memoir memorable.

Start Date: October 7, 2026
End Date: December 16, 2026 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Beyond Ekphrasis: Encounters with Poetry & Visual Art £160.00 * Tutor: Flo Reynolds

Beyond Ekphrasis: Encounters with Poetry & Visual Art

Looking at looking; positioning the self; translating image into poem.

Start Date: October 8, 2026
End Date: December 17, 2026 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Transreading Middle Eastern Poetry: Mid 20th Century to the Present Day £160.00 * Tutor: Roz Shayan Naimi

Transreading Middle Eastern Poetry: Mid 20th Century to the Present Day

Get inspired in this survey of contemporary Middle Eastern poetry.

Start Date: October 8, 2026
End Date: December 17, 2026 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
The Poetic Engine: Working With, Through, & Against Form £160.00 * Tutor: Erica Hesketh

The Poetic Engine: Working With, Through, & Against Form

Writing form-forward work by looking at formally inventive work old and new.

Start Date: October 9, 2026
End Date: December 18, 2026 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Using Poetry to Sharpen our Observation of the Natural World £160.00 * Tutor: Ellene Glenn Moore

Using Poetry to Sharpen our Observation of the Natural World

Nature poetics beyond capturing the scene.

Start Date: October 12, 2026
End Date: December 21, 2026 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Somebody’s Walking Over My Grave £135.00 * Tutor: Sascha Akhtar

Somebody’s Walking Over My Grave

Waking the dead – buried treasure in the poetics of the passed.

Start Date: October 17, 2026 10.30am–1pm
End Date: November 27, 2026 ( 42 Days )
Type: In-person, Online • Location:
Acts of Telling: Extraordinary Narrators Studio £118.00 * Tutor: Catherine Smith

Acts of Telling: Extraordinary Narrators Studio

Oh speaker, my speaker. Varying the narrator – personae with potential.

Start Date: October 30, 2026
End Date: November 27, 2026 ( 29 Days )
Type: Online
Gutsy Cute Studio £118.00 * Tutor: Ellora

Gutsy Cute Studio

Get Cuter. The doe-eyed and dangerous does poetic drama.

Start Date: November 2, 2026
End Date: November 30, 2026 ( 29 Days )
Type: Online
Tales from the Wetlands Studio £118.00 * Tutor: Penny Boxall

Tales from the Wetlands Studio

The splendidly soggy: writing the wondrous of the wild and the wet.

Start Date: November 3, 2026
End Date: December 1, 2026 ( 29 Days )
Type: Online
Show 17 More

How Online Works

Online Programme consists of text-based courses with no video content. These take place in CAMPUS, our digital platform for poets. CAMPUS is a Social Learning Network (SLN) that lives as part of The Poetry School website, so if you already have an account with us, you can access it straight away.

If you don’t currently have an account with The Poetry School, then you can register for free here.

Our online courses are structured according to regular fortnightly sessions (on average this amounts to 5 assignments over 10 weeks). Some also contain scheduled live chats, a ‘real time’, live-typed chatroom discussion between the tutor and students. Each term we offer a mixture of generative classes (writing new poems), feedback classes (honing old ones) and reading classes (learning more about poetry).

Each online course has its own dedicated private group in CAMPUS. Once you book a course you will automatically be enrolled and be able to access your course group. You will use your course group to post messages, interact with other poets, participate in live chats, submit poems and download assignments and reading lists. Everything is transcribed and kept for you in your group and you will be able to access everything – poems, messages, assignments, live chat transcripts – for as long as you need to.

We have worked hard to make CAMPUS as fuss-free and as close to face-to-face teaching as possible, with the additional benefits of convenience and access that online allows. If you are new to online learning, and unsure about whether it is suitable, please go to our IS ONLINE RIGHT FOR ME? section below.

ARE YOU AN INTERNATIONAL STUDENT?

As well as normal online programme, we also run a small selection of International Courses, which are exactly the same as our other online courses, but don’t contain any live chats or other synchronous learning elements, and are fully accessible regardless of what time zone you live in. Just look out for the ‘International Courses’ label in the course title. (Please also note that our Fortnightly Feedback, Studios and Masterclasses are also fully accessible to international poets).

 

What will I learn?

Each online course consists of a mixture of reading, discussion and writing exercises to stimulate thoughts, creative expression and technical craft, alongside encouragement and constructive feedback from your tutor and peers on your finished work.

Content will vary course to course, but on all our online courses you can expect the following:

  • reading, writing and thinking about poetry in different ways
  • exposure to new writers, voices, forms and styles
  • the confidence to write more and devote more time to writing
  • generating new work (on average 4-5 finished poems per course)
  • discovery of new areas and subjects for research
  • better understanding of how to make choices (length, theme, tone, etc)
  • enhanced critical skills
  • practical advice on further development

We pride ourselves on the standard of our teaching and the poetry produced on every one of our courses. Many of our online students have gone on to successfully submit their course work for publication in magazines and journals, and had success in competitions. But don’t take it from us: read some of our many student testimonials.

 

Course formats

The Poetry School offers a wide variety of online courses, and subject matter and structure varies from term to term, so please always check the course information carefully.

We have five main types of online course:

Interactive Courses consist of one assignment posted per ‘session’ every fortnight. (Most courses last for 5 fortnightly sessions over 10 weeks). You will be expected to post poems in response to an assignment, and then feedback on each other’s work in your CAMPUS online group forum. Each session culminates in a 2-hour chatroom exchange with your course tutor and fellow students, where all the latest poems are examined in a free-flowing, live-typed, text-based discussion. All live chats are then transcribed and archived for students to re-read whenever they want. New assignments are posted after each live chat. Class size = 12 maximum.

Note: most our interactive courses are fully adaptable to international students and others who might have difficulty making all the live chats. To find out more information, please email [email protected]

International Courses are exactly the same as Interactive courses, but there are no live chats, making them accessible to students and tutors who live in all international time zones. All feedback and discussion on these courses is written/typed via the private group message board. Class size = 12 maximum.

Transreading courses – co-curated with Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese – invite us to write poems and translations in response to wide readings. Like translators, we read ‘the originals’ closely and intimately in order to transcend cultures, languages, and genres. We read voraciously: poems brought to English by translation, multilingual texts, fiction, nonfiction, drama, archives, ephemera, visual arts. Through trans-reading and trans-writing, we open our poetries to the multi-literate world. Transreading courses, without live chats, are suitable for UK and international students. Class size = 12 maximum.

Fortnightly Feedback courses are a good way to polish up poems-in-progress, and early draft work you are preparing for submission or preparation. Students share and leave written feedback within their CAMPUS online group forum only. There is no live chat component. These courses are suitable for UK & international students. Class size = 16 maximum.

Poetry Studios are short, intensive poetry writing courses that last 3-4 weeks. Unlike our standard 10 week courses, the emphasis on ‘Studios’ is more heavily skewed towards writing and getting words on the page, with a softer focus on group feedback and editing. Class size = 16 maximum.

Masterclasses are 12 week courses with a much deeper consideration of technical craft and critical theory. For advanced students only: fluency with poetic language and ideas will be assumed. There are no live chats and they are suitable for UK and International students. Class size = 10 maximum.

Subject matter and level of ability for each course vary hugely from term to term.

 

Is Online right for me?

Online courses are open to all students but a basic level of digital literacy is essential. The Poetry School can help you with CAMPUS technical issues, but you need to be a confident user of digital platforms to take part in these classes.

No specialist software is required – you just need a computer, tablet or mobile device and a wifi connection. All the live chats are typed/written and done in a multi-user chat room on CAMPUS, and due to the fast pace of these sessions, it is recommended you use a laptop or PC, or a tablet/smartphone with a keyboard attachment.

 

FAQ

How many courses can I take?
To ensure the best experience, we recommend taking no more than two courses per term. If you are interested in signing up to more, please email us at [email protected] to discuss the different course schedules.
Help! I’m having technical problems
Please email administration@poetryschool if you’re having issues with CAMPUS or the Poetry School website. If it’s a local technical issue (i.e., with your computer, not our website) then please seek advice or help from a friend.
What happens if everyone on my course is much better than I am?
‘Better’ is very subjective. Our online courses are designed to be non-partisan, as we believe the best kind of educational experience we can offer is one where all types of student can meet and collaborate meaningfully with one another regardless of how they each self-identify (beginner, amateur, pro). There will be some poets in every group that, even though they have publishing credits, still feel very much like starters. Once you’ve got through the first session, you’ll see how useful, supportive and generous being in a large group of poets of varying levels can be. Many advanced poets also like having new writers in the group, as they tend to have very fresh and original approaches to reading work. All contributions will be extremely welcome.
Will I receive a certificate at the end?
Unfortunately we don’t do those. If you’re interested in something fully accredited, and you’re based in the UK, we do offer a Writing Poetry MA.
I desperately want to do a particular course, but I can’t make the live chats. Can I still do the course?
We’re happy to be flexible with individual course arrangements. Just let us know before or after you’ve enrolled and we will try accommodate you onto your course the best way possible. It’s not always feasible, but we do what we can. If you’re based abroad, then we offer a range of International Courses each term that have no live chats, as well as Feedback, Studio and Online Reading courses.

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