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.
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Tutor: Richard Georges
Explore the muse of disasters and learn how we can usefully write trauma, tragedy, and catastrophe for a better tomorrow.
£122.00 *
Tutor: Kate Potts
Find the forms, craft, and confidence to think through pretence, fraudulence, and personae.
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Tutor: Kathryn Simmonds
Learn where your resistances are and try working against them. Who knows what will happen?
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Tutor: Stav Poleg
Enter the dark forest to find inspiration in the mesmerising world of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
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Tutor: Jennifer Wong
Consider the shape and weight of loss as we explore the elegy.
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Tutor: Rebecca Watts
Knock your loose poems into shape with some concentrated feedback from poet and editor, Rebecca Watts.
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Tutor: Sue Burge
Find inspiration in the cinema of Hitchcock as we experiment with suspense, mother figures, and MacGuffins in our poetry.
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Tutor: Elena Karina Byrne
Push your ekphrastic practice to the next level under the guidance of expert editor and writer, Elena Karina Byrne.
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Tutor: Jonathan Edwards
Experiment with sprawling forms, large scale works, and ambitious sequences to create a lasting impact.
£122.00 *
Tutor: Natasha Hakimi Zapata
Reflect on home, exile, journeys, war, and humanity.
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Tutor: Luke Thompson
Explore the creative potential of the pamphlet form with expert pamphlet publishers, Guillemot Press.
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Tutor: Jodie Hollander
Closely examine the work of Robert Frost to take inspiration from one of poetry’s true masters.
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Tutor: Sophie Seita
Encounter and experiment with the essayistic, as we blend poetry, memoir, and criticism to create radical new forms.
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Tutor: Catherine Smith
Learn to use daring figurative language and harness the power of surprising imagery.
£122.00 *
Tutor: Rhys Trimble
Explore avant-garde Sound Poetry, as we look for patterns and music in language that are not rooted in syntax.
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Tutor: Danne Jobin
Explore poetry and collage to expand your practice and open up new avenues for mixed-media writing.
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Tutor: Sascha Akhtar
Like love and sex, death is one of the great mysteries; meditate on the many approaches to the topic and develop exciting new work of your own in this field.
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Tutor: Tice
Join us to create community through writing, as we explore that difficult topic of loneliness.
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Tutor: Holly Hopkins
Grab your Indiana Jones hat and trowel – in this course we’ll generate new poems inspired by the work of archaeologists and the objects they uncover.
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).
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:
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.
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.
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. To find out whether an online course is right for you, please take our self-assessment quiz.
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.