Poetry & Divination: Generating Poems Through Ritual & Symbol
Explore divination as a daily ritual that can be incorporated into any writers’ practice.
* This course will take place on the video-conferencing platform ZOOM *
The rituals of divination have been used throughout history and across cultures to gain insight and offer solutions to life’s problems. In this workshop, they’ll act as creative interventions to your writing practice and as mediums to assist you in writing yourself out of creative blocks.
We will look at familiar poets who have incorporated divination and ritual into their work, such as Sylvia Plath and W. B. Yeats, as well as contemporary poets, such as Lucy Mercer, Rachel Long, Toby Campion, and CAConrad. Through the work of these poets, we’ll explore how divination and ritual can imbue a poem with rich symbology, offering new avenues for language and meaning, as well as providing unique ideas for structuring and shaping work. Drawing on a variety of divination systems – such as tarot, cartomancy, runes, bibliomancy, and omen reading – participants will experiment with different divinatory methods to generate poems, from drawing runes to write haiku, to casting tarot to inspire sonnets.
This workshop is an opportunity to step into a new way of writing and to allow chance and ritual to inform your practice. Come with an open mind and ready to explore a different way into writing.
1 x 2.5-hour session, running 6.30–9pm (BST), on 7 April 2025. This course will take place on the video-conferencing platform ZOOM.
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].
Image credit: Susanna Marsiglia
About Oakley Flanagan 
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Oakley Flanagan is a writer and poet. As a playwright: ‘This Queer House’, VAULT Festival. Their poetry appears in bath magg, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, The North, Under the Radar and Wasafiri. Oakley is an alum of Roundhouse Poetry Collective, The London Library Emerging Writer Programme, The Genesis Jewish Book Week Emerging Writers’ Programme, and the Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective. They are a winner of the ruth weiss Emerging Poet Award and their long poem, G&T, was shortlisted for the Pat Kavanagh Prize.
"Love connecting with a really diverse group of people who share a common love for poetry. Such a pleasure to get to know people through their artistic expression. Feels like a real privilege."
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