Carmen et Error
Explore erotics and find perfect poetry in imperfection.
* This course will take place on the video-conferencing platform ZOOM *
“A poem and a mistake”. In this workshop, we’ll take Ovid’s cited reason for exile as a motif for exploring erotic poetics and as a means to think about the role accidents and mistakes can play in your poetry.
We will consider the erotic in close reading of poems and discussion of essays from Ovid, Ann Carson, Bernadette Mayer, and Golnoosh Nour, amongst others. Texts will be circulated prior to the session. We will consider notions of abandon, refusal, and ekphrasis within poetics and ask how these elements might contribute to, or trouble, the erotic within your own writing, before beginning to explore our own personal erotics through in-class writing.
Throughout the session, we will also explore literal imperfections in poetic works and consider what “signatures of imperfection” might look like in this context and what they can actually add to the works themselves; we will also consider the value of work that appears naïve, asking what an innocent, or unsophisticated, tone can bring to a poetics of mistakes. We’ll explore what mistakes can offer us as writers, especially in relation to the erotic, and think together about poetic forms that permit reader slippage, and what this means. We’ll ask how we find the right level of vulnerability in form and content, and how a sympathetic contract is maintained. We will examine politically charged works from poets including Mahmoud Darwish, Audre Lorde and Shash Trevett, considering the role of erotics in activism and how commitment to social change is an embodied act.
1-off Zoom session at 10.30am – 1pm (BST on Sunday 6th September)
Concessions & Accessibility
To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here.
What to Expect
This course is part of The September Sessions: 10 Years of the MA in Writing in Poetry, a series of Zoom workshops celebrating 10 Years of our MA in Writing in Poetry programme. Check out the full line up 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: WikiArt
About Rushika Wick 
View Profile
Rushika Wick graduated from the Poetry School & Newcastle University Writing Poetry MA in 2025. Rushika runs sunseekers poetry project with Ana Seferovic – curating occasional multidisciplinary and cross-modal arts events. She co-curates ancestral, a poetry reading series with fellow MA graduate and poet Sitron Panapoulos at a residency in Present Tense, London. She has collaborated with dancers, produced ekphrastic work for the National Gallery and creates poem objects. Her work has been widely published.
Her first collection Afterlife as Trash (Verve 2021) had work highly commended in the Forward Prizes. Her latest collection Horse (Broken Sleep 2025) concerns speculative archives and was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize. Infections of Loss (Broken Sleep, 2025) was the PBS summer pamphlet selection.
"Poetry School is giving me the freedom to express myself in the the expanse of poetry. It has giving me the sanctuary to feel connected, to be healed. It has opened my window for the garden of imagination."
A Cloud in Trousers: Emotional Intensification Through Distance 
A Magnificent Error: Poetry after Magritte 
Sacred Female Rage