Creative Constraint [Summer 2024]

Creative Constraint [Summer 2024]

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 (GMT), starts 6 May 2024. This is the third of a three-term course and all places are currently reserved for continuing students, who have a 2-week Priority Booking period. Any remaining places will be made available to new students on 11 March. 

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 View Profile

Jacqueline Saphra is a poet, playwright, teacher, and activist. She is the author of nine plays, four chapbooks, and five poetry collections. Her second collection, All My Mad Mothers was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and her fifth, Velvel’s Violin, a Poetry Book Society recommendation, was out from Nine Arches Press in July 2023. Jacqueline is a founder member of Poets for the Planet.  

‘Jacqui is a warm and engaging teacher; her classes are inclusive and welcoming; students are helped to feel part of a trusted community. There are many prompts to encourage writing and the structure of the classes helps poets to work hard and learn fast in a close-knit online environment.’

- Summer 2023 survey response

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