The Craft of Poetry: A Course for New Poets
Perfect your poetic practice (and get answers to questions you’ve been too afraid to ask!).
Thanks to Arts Council funding, we are able to offer 100% bursary places on this new Beginners course, for poets who would not be able to attend otherwise.
Sometimes it can be difficult to know where to start with poetry; and where to end. In the context of a busy life, the impulse to write often dissipates at an alarming rate. Our ideas for poems can be fleeting, hard to define, and harder still to capture. What to do with the first draft of a poem, one that meant something deeply personal at its inception but, once drafted, seems to want to mean something else entirely?
This difficulty can’t be easily mitigated, nor should it. Jorge Luis Borges said that whenever he confronted a blank page, he felt like he had to relearn all of literature. Accordingly, he described himself as more of a reader than a writer. This course, aimed at ‘new’ poets (in Borges’s figuration, this will be all poets), takes cues from both of these ideas simultaneously. Together, we will establish a reading-centred poetry writing practice, with the intention of opening students to new ways of thinking about, and generating, poems. To this end, we’ll focus on a practical grounding in the fundamentals of craft and work to demystify a few aspects of poetry that new poets sometimes struggle with – such as metre, prosody, imagery, ekphrasis, nature-writing, and translation/imitation.
Along the way, we’ll honour the challenge of poetry by treating it as a craft that, like any other, can be learned; we’ll approach our learning with good humour and grace; broaden and deepen our reading of contemporary and classic poets; open up a sense of what poetry is, and can be; encourage you to experiment widely and wildly, and so move closer to writing poems that are cogent, truthful, and memorable. In other words, we’ll approach our writing as being for our readers.
We will draw on a wide variety of poets for these workshops, likely including: Rainer Maria Rilke, Michael Donaghy, Emily Dickinson, W.S. Graham, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Veronica Forrest Thomson, Denise Riley, Kathleen Jamie, WH Auden, Seamus Heaney, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Wendy Cope, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Oswald, Don Paterson, John Burnside, Sean O’Brien, Terrance Hayes, Agha Shahid Ali, Mimi Khalvati, Edwin Morgan, Fernando Pessoa, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Jorge Luis Borges.
6 fortnightly Zoom sessions on Saturdays, 10.30am – 12.30pm (GMT/BST), starts 25 Jan 2025.
This free course has been designed specifically for students who would not be able to afford the courses in our general programme and, as such, entry is by application.
THIS COURSE IS NOW FULL. To be added to the waiting list, please email [email protected].
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: @fotios-photos
About Colin Bramwell 
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Colin Bramwell is a poet from the Black Isle. Colin was the runner up for the 2020 Edwin Morgan Prize and won the 2018 John Dryden Translation Competition and the 2024 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. His poems and translations have been published widely in magazines like PN Review, Poetry Review, Magma, The London Magazine, and elsewhere. His most recent book was aonghas macneacail’s beyond (Shearsman, 2024); his next, Fower Pessoas, will be published by Carcanet in February 2025. He holds a creative writing doctorate from the University of St Andrews.
"I really enjoy being part of a community of poets and the valuable sense of growth the classes gives me in terms of workshopping and writing. I also really enjoy being introduced to new poetry."
Poetic Forms for Beginners
Beginners’ Workshop Group
Friday Workshop with Natasha Hakimi Zapata