Disrupting the Lyric: Complication, Collapse, & Reimagining the Voice  

Explore what happens when the lyric voice is put under pressure, when voice becomes unstable, or fragmentary.

* This course will take place on the video-conferencing platform ZOOM *

What happens when the lyric “I” cannot sustain itself? When a poem refuses to move smoothly from feeling to resolution, and instead comes apart, rejects a traditional narrative arc, or begins again? What emerges when coherence gives way, when voice becomes unstable, provisional, or no longer holds a single, unified position?  

This one-off workshop explores poems in which the lyric voice is placed under pressure: interrupted by competing narratives, temporal shifts, or destabilising turns in thought. With texts by Terrance Hayes, Kim Addonizio, Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, and Jennifer Lee Tsai, we will encounter voices that pivot mid-scene, poems that revise their own terms, and work that shifts between registers within the same poem, moving from narrative to abstraction, from direct address to philosophical reflection, often mid-thought or mid-line, unsettling the sense that the poem is guided by a single, continuous voice.  

Together, we will examine how these pressures manifest in the poem: where language strains, where a voice splits or recasts itself, and where the poem resists its own forward movement. Through focused prompts, participants will generate new work, exploring how interruption can become generative, producing tension, instability, and unexpected forms of meaning. We will also consider how structure itself, through fragmentation, repetition, or abrupt formal shifts, can enact these dynamics, allowing the poem to think in real time. 

1-off Zoom session at 6.30–9.00pm (BST on Monday 7th 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: Luan Albarracin

About Ophira Adar View Profile

Ophira Adar is a poet and writer from London. Her work has appeared in Shearsman, Poetry Wales, Under the Radar, 14 Magazine and Butcher’s Dog, among others. Her pamphlet Say I Am Not Your Mother was Highly Commended in the 2025 International Book & Pamphlet Competition (The Poetry Business), judged by Kim Moore. She graduated in 2024 from The Poetry School / Newcastle University with an MA (Distinction) in Writing Poetry.  

In 2025, Ophira was commissioned by the Manchester Jewish Museum to produce I Seek a Wild Star, a poetic sequence responding to stories and objects in their archive. She has taught poetry workshops for the Manchester Jewish Museum, exploring family histories, and for Islington Council, on the life and work of the nineteenth-century poet Amy Levy.  

Ophira is currently working on her first collection,  A Calculation of Absences. 

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