Hymns to Life: Poetry, Documentary, & Time

Capturing temporality in your own personal poetics.

Poems demand we take our time in both their crafting and their reading – sometimes days, sometimes years. In this course, we’ll experiment with time as an essential poetry ingredient across form, structure, and subject matter. We’ll consider how life events, great and small, can shape our poetry – and how, in return, poetry may reveal the shapes of our lives. 

With a playful take on creative constraint, we’ll try different ways of writing life as it happens, before returning to and reworking our texts with the benefit of time. We’ll explore how we might record our contemporary world through documentary poetry, and how we might connect personal stories to deeper histories. 

Taking inspiration from writers including Bernadette Mayer, M. NourbeSe Philip, Sean Borodale, James Schuyler, Nat Raha, Frank O’Hara, Alice Oswald, and Nicole Sealey, we’ll write poems that speak to past, present and future moments. By the end of the course, you will have developed a toolkit of techniques to enrich your poetry now and throughout your writing life. 

5 fortnightly sessions over 10 weeks, starting 21 January 2025. No live chats. Suitable for UK & International students. 

Concessions & Accessibility

To apply for a concessionary 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]. For more information visit our Online Courses page. 

Image credit: @suzyhazelwood

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