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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

Experimental Poetry and Where it Came From: A Retrospective Masterclass Sold Out! Tutor: Vik Shirley

Experimental Poetry and Where it Came From: A Retrospective Masterclass

Swim in the waters of joyous experimentalism to inspire new innovations of your own!

Start Date: September 22, 2025
End Date: December 15, 2025 ( 85 Days )
Type: Online
Global Majority Writing from the British Countryside: A Poetry Masterclass £215.00 * Tutor: Louisa Adjoa Parker

Global Majority Writing from the British Countryside: A Poetry Masterclass

Explore the joy and resilience of pastoral writing from Global Majority poets.

Start Date: September 23, 2025
End Date: December 16, 2025 ( 85 Days )
Type: Online
The Drunken Boat – Transreading Rimbaud: A Masterclass £215.00 * Tutor: Stav Poleg

The Drunken Boat – Transreading Rimbaud: A Masterclass

Take inspiration from the enfant terrible of Surrealism and the master of symbolist writing.

Start Date: September 24, 2025
End Date: December 17, 2025 ( 85 Days )
Type: Online
Somatics: Writing & Ritual Masterclass Sold Out! Tutor: Dr Fran Lock

Somatics: Writing & Ritual Masterclass

Crafting connection – poetic body meets world.

Start Date: September 25, 2025
End Date: December 18, 2025 ( 85 Days )
Type: Online
‘What Work Is’: Class, Labour, and the Privilege of Poetry £135.00 * Tutor: Ruth Beddow

‘What Work Is’: Class, Labour, and the Privilege of Poetry

“There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money, either.”

Start Date: September 29, 2025
End Date: December 8, 2025 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Writing in the Dark – Poetry for the Waning Year £135.00 * Tutor: Jessica Traynor

Writing in the Dark – Poetry for the Waning Year

Summon the poetics of the seasonally sensitive with dark arts, folklore, and myth.  

Start Date: September 30, 2025
End Date: December 9, 2025 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Fortnightly Feedback with Zakia Carpenter-Hall £100.00 * Tutor: Zakia Carpenter-Hall

Fortnightly Feedback with Zakia Carpenter-Hall

Knock loose poems into shape with some concentrated feedback from poet, critic, and tutor, Zakia Carpenter-Hall.

Start Date: October 1, 2025
End Date: December 17, 2025 ( 78 Days )
Type: Online
Talking Poetry: Using Interview Transcripts in Poetic Practice £135.00 * Tutor: Sarah Hesketh

Talking Poetry: Using Interview Transcripts in Poetic Practice

Explore oral history, transcripts, and documentary in your poetry.

Start Date: October 1, 2025
End Date: December 10, 2025 ( 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: October 1, 2025
End Date: December 10, 2025 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Degenerate Art: Transreading Paul Klee Sold Out! Tutor: Peter Hughes

Degenerate Art: Transreading Paul Klee

Expand your ekphrasis as we Transread Paul Klee's 'degenerate art' art into innovative new poems.

Start Date: October 2, 2025
End Date: December 11, 2025 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Spells, Prayers, & Magic Studio Sold Out! Tutor: Helen Ivory

Spells, Prayers, & Magic Studio

Conjure, invoke, charm, and create with the raw magic of poetic language.

Start Date: October 6, 2025
End Date: November 3, 2025 ( 29 Days )
Type: Online
Invisible Frames: On & Beyond the Sonnet £135.00 * Tutor: Edward Doegar

Invisible Frames: On & Beyond the Sonnet

Find form and freedom in the famous fourteen.

Start Date: October 6, 2025
End Date: December 15, 2025 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Care Poetics £135.00 * Tutor: Suzannah V. Evans

Care Poetics

Show your caring side as we explore the possibilities of a more caring poetics.

Start Date: October 7, 2025
End Date: December 16, 2025 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Transreading the Archive with Corbel Stone Press Sold Out! Tutor: Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton

Transreading the Archive with Corbel Stone Press

Explore the treasures of textual archives from around the world with experimental poet-publishers, Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton of Corbel Stone Press.

Start Date: October 7, 2025
End Date: December 16, 2025 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Ecology of Memory: Multimedia Transgenerational Ecopoetics £135.00 * Tutor: Elizabeth Torres (Madam Neverstop)

Ecology of Memory: Multimedia Transgenerational Ecopoetics

Explore environmental justice, ecological grief, and environmental memory through innovative multimedia poetry.

Start Date: October 8, 2025
End Date: December 17, 2025 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Follow the Impulse of the Brush: Transreading Japanese Forms Sold Out! Tutor: Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana

Follow the Impulse of the Brush: Transreading Japanese Forms

Inspiration from the East – Transread Japanese forms, poets, and traditions with Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana.

Start Date: October 9, 2025
End Date: December 18, 2025 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Learning from the Female Poets: Influence & Inspiration Sold Out! Tutor: Clare Pollard

Learning from the Female Poets: Influence & Inspiration

Join the great poetic conversation and think about how to steal, allude, translate, remix, modernise, and answer back.

Start Date: October 9, 2025
End Date: December 18, 2025 ( 71 Days )
Type: Online
Birds & Birdsongs Studio+ £125.00 * Tutor: Cat Woodward

Birds & Birdsongs Studio+

Thirteen ways of writing an ode to a darkling skylark.

Start Date: October 13, 2025
End Date: November 17, 2025 ( 36 Days )
Type: Online
Good Grief Studio: Navigating Trauma in Poetry & Song £100.00 * Tutor: Matt Bryden

Good Grief Studio: Navigating Trauma in Poetry & Song

Write through loss, in all its forms, to find what you've gained on the other side of grief.

Start Date: November 3, 2025
End Date: December 1, 2025 ( 29 Days )
Type: Online
First & Last Lines Studio £100.00 * Tutor: Isabelle Baafi

First & Last Lines Studio

Learn to capture a reader’s attention within seconds and leave them wanting more.

Start Date: November 3, 2025
End Date: December 1, 2025 ( 29 Days )
Type: Online
Show 14 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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