Creative Constraint
Mix up your writing, and learn new skills and techniques with Jacqueline Saphra.
* This course will take place on the video-conferencing platform ZOOM *
Whatever else it maybe, a poem is a verbal artefact which must be as skilfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle – WH Auden
In this three-term course you’ll be offered strategies to free your imagination as well as ways to contain it; you’ll learn to develop your writing through experimentation and close reading. Each week you’ll read a selection of inspiring poems and participate in playful, exploratory, and inventive writing exercises to help you generate new poems and hone your writing skills. Alongside this, using examples and exercises designed to advance your understanding of form, you’ll discover how craft, technique and constraint can enable and enhance your creative impulse, driving your poetry into exciting and unfamiliar territories.
10 weekly Zoom sessions on Mondays, 6.45–8.45pm (BST), starts 15 May 2023. 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. 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]
About Jacqueline Saphra 
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Jacqueline Saphra is a poet, playwright, teacher, and activist. She is the author of four chapbooks and four poetry collections. Her second collection All My Mad Mothers was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and her fifth, Velvel’s Violin will be out from Nine Arches Press in July 2023. Jacqueline is a founder member of Poets for the Planet.
‘I definitely found a vibrant community of poets of all ages and backgrounds willing to share their work, experience, and knowledge. As an aspiring writer, I take with me the level of commitment coming from everybody in the group stimulating, embracing, and inclusive. Also, being in touch with other poets opened up for me a world of events and connections I would have not been able to know or approach on my own.’
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