Body-ody-ody-ody – A Study
Give your poetic body physical presence, as we render and write the physical body in new and interesting ways.
* This course will take place on video-conferencing platform ZOOM *
Over this fortnightly course, we’ll study the body within the poem, exploring the varied approaches of writers who render and write the body in new and interesting ways including Victoria Kennefick, Andrew McMillian, Pascale Petit, Cecilia Knapp, and Momtaza Mehri, amongst others.
We’ll learn how to make the body feel real in our own poems through honing an anatomic and physiological eye, an exactness of language, and a heightened sensitivity to movement – physical and liminal. We’ll learn how to give the people in our poems real bodies, real faces, real hands; we’ll give them gravity, height, weight, that can be read, seen, felt, 3D, through the page.
5 fortnightly Zoom sessions on Thursdays, 6.30–8pm (BST), starts 28 Sep 2023.
To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to administ[email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. More information about how our Video Courses work can be found on the Video Courses page. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].
Image Credit: Joyce McCown
About Rachel Long 
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Rachel Long is a poet & the founder of Octavia – Poetry Collective for Women of Colour. Her debut collection, My Darling from the Lions (Picador 2020 / Tin House 2021) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, The Costa Book Award, The Rathbones Folio Prize, and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. The US edition of My Darling from the Lions was a New York Times Book Review, and named one of the 100 must-read books of 2021 by TIME.
‘I loved this course so much! I felt like Rachel got us into a really relaxed creative space. There’s something unique about the way she teaches – inclusive, warm, funny, and expansive. I would sign up for another course with Rachel like a shot!’
By Any Means Necessary: Writing After the Cinema-scape of Spike Lee
‘O Soft Embalmer’: The Poetry of Sleep
Technique [How to Discover or Disown It]