Field Poetics Masterclass: Listening, Presencing, & Practicing at Sites of Ruination & Repair

Beginning from place – bring site specificity to your poetic practice.

‘Still, the eye is a camera, room for everything that is to enter, like the cylinder called the satisfaction of hollow space. Only language grows such grass-green grass.’ – Rosmarie Waldrop

‘Meadowing as a gerund for the provisional, expansive fieldwork of poetic opening, inflected by the immersive, in medias res quality of dreaming – which dispossesses us of mastery and stable perspective’ – Maria Sledmere

Explore what writing poetry with the field means today. Thinking beyond ecopoetics towards an enquiry into the scope of circulations, colonial afterlives, toxic infrastructures and listening practices, the course aids participants in writing with a field of their choice. This field could be psychic, embodied or site-based, be that a body of water, an experience of urban space or attending a protest.

Thinking with the tools of situated knowledges, decolonial anthropology and conceptual poetry, we will enquire into how poems create affective spaces that orient us in a particular site while tending to their absences, context and power structures. Moving away from the field as sealed environmental phenomena limited by representation and a colonial or masculinist gaze, this course aims to actively think together about a situated approach to place-based writing.

Mapping the historical lineage of experimental and conceptual poets who orient themselves in the field, we will read Rosmarie Waldrop, Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, Tina Darragh & Marcella Durand, Sean Bonney, Myung Mi Kim, CA Conrad, Juliana Spahr, and Verity Spott. We will contextualise our work in contemporary field theory through reading Edouard Glissant, Bridget Crone, Ann Laura Stoler, Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Donna Haraway, Jane Bennet, and Maria Sledmere.

We will conduct fieldwork at a chosen site, writing field notes, taking audio recordings and iPhone photographs. Testing out field writing methods such as word diagrams, prosaic poetry and automatic writing, we will collectively create new approaches for the practice of field poetics. Alongside field visits, participants can research archival images of their site and current policy documents. What poems might emerge from fieldwork? And how might poetry offer a nonlinear creative output that aids us in understanding the history, politics, alter-rhythms and temporalities that accrete at the site? At the end of the course, we will have each created a series of field poems and a collective manifesto on field poetics methodology.

Masterclasses are an expanded version of our International Courses, with a much deeper consideration of technical craft and critical theory. These 12-week courses (maximum 12 places) are for advanced students only, and fluency with poetic language and ideas will be assumed. There are no live chats and they are suitable for UK and International students.

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. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].

What to Expect

Please check the left hand side of this page for information on how this course works in practice, under the heading ‘Course Style‘. If you’re unsure as to what any of the terms there mean, or if this course is a good fit for you, please visit our What to Expect page which includes some further information on how our courses function.

Image credit: @ricrawfo

About Ruby Reding View Profile

Ruby Reding is an artist and writer based in Rotterdam. Her films and installations encompass poetic fieldwork at sites of infrastructure and environmental violence. Previous films have screened at Images Festival (Toronto), Victoria Project Space (Athens) and Institute of Contemporary Arts (London). Her writing has been published in The Minutes, TACO! Gallery, Tique Magazine, and Tears in the Fence Journal.

She holds an MFA from Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, and previously studied Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and English Literature at Cambridge University. She was Research Assistant with Sophie Seita at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her recent film ‘all this distance’ (2025) is a meditation on how scientific apparatus, logistics, and remote intimacies have shaped our contemporary conditions of closeness and distance. Ruby is currently instigating new research on soft metallurgies, tracing entanglements between aluminium supply chains and their correlation with critical raw materials, EU policy, whiteness, and agency.

"Following the courses at Poetry School has helped a great deal in being exposed to different approaches to poetry, and to the standards and norms of modern poetics."

- Autumn 2025 Survey Response

The Poetry School