Making Poetry Happen: Poetry Performance by Women & Gender Nonconforming Artists
Connecting the performative to your poetic, inspired by innovative contemporary practitioners.
Join us as we shine a spotlight on women and gender nonconforming artists who explore performative approaches to poetry. From the poet’s relationship with their audience and the sonic potential of language, to embodied writing processes and the physicality of text itself, this course offers various ways of exploring, unlocking, and experimenting with the performative possibilities of poetry. Each assignment builds new connections between poetry and performance through a fascinating set of works by some of the most exciting and innovative contemporary practitioners performing in the UK, including Hannah Silva, Nathan Walker, Maja Jantar, Verity Spott, Camilla Nelson, Harry Josephine Giles, CAConrad, Sarah Dawson, and Karenjit Sandhu.
Making Poetry Happen also introduces students to a variety of writing techniques and forms with which to experiment, as well as providing concrete tips for devising and delivering IRL performances.
This course is suitable for students of all levels of experience including poets interested in performance and performers interested in poetry, as well as artists with more established hybrid practices. Students will be welcome to share videos, sound recordings, and visual scores, while also being free to stick to page-based pieces.
5 fortnightly sessions over 10 weeks. No live chats. Suitable for UK & 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: Akshaya Premjith.
About Iris Colomb 
View Profile
Iris Colomb is always searching for new ways of making, performing and experiencing poetry. Her practice involves building connections between visual and verbal forms of text through projects involving performance, object scores, improvisation, sound, chance, multilingual writing, and experimental translation. A selection of her performative works are currently being exhibited in her solo show ‘Try! Try! Try! Again!’ at the Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library (until early 2026).
Iris has given individual, collaborative, interactive, and durational performances online as well as in the UK, France, Germany, Norway, Austria, Romania, and Chile; at Intrications Poeìtiques Transnationales (Paris), the Bucharest International Poetry Festival, the international transmedial poetic festival räume für notizen (“room for notes”, Vienna), and the Southbank Centre’s Poetry International Festival, among others.
Iris’s first full-length poetry collection, Nothing Intensifies, was published by Pamenar Press earlier this year. She has alos published five poetry pamphlets, including Just Promise You Won’t Write (Gang Press, 2019), Ridiculous Unlikely Attempt (Hesterglock Press, 2023) and Where Do You Begin in This (Ma Bibliothèque, 2024). Her poems have also appeared in several UK magazines and anthologies, as well as French, Austrian, Hungarian, Spanish, German, Brazilian, Chilean and US publications.
She is one half of the double-act Soft Play with artist Paul Ingram; and one half of text-sound duo [something’s happening] with musician Daryl Worthington. She is also part of improvising trios Small Print Drama (with Douglas Benford and Tom Ward) and TheThreeFeet (with John Bisset and Andrew Ciccone).
More information about Iris’s practice and projects can be found at www.iriscolomb.com.
"My every-day job is really so tough that I cannot live without the Poetry School to support my writing life."
Darkness into Light: Poetry for the Waxing Year
Re-Weirding Albion
Tangents, Risk, & Intensity: Neurodiversity as Creative Process