Wilderness, Solitude, & Beauty: Poetry & Islands
Come island-hopping and explore the far-flung and windswept world of islands in your writing.
* This course will take place on the video-conferencing platform ZOOM *
‘Hearken, thou craggy ocean pyramid!’ – John Keats
We often imagine islands to be places of wilderness, solitude, and beauty; separate from the mainland, they can seem exempt from its rules. Islands can be tough places – tides roar in, throwing wood, pebbles, human-made debris, and sometimes even people about. Islands are also points of connection: waypoints on a journey, shapes on a map. Poets have been writing about islands forever. Looking towards them, glinting on the line of the horizon, and looking from them out to the wide expanse of ocean. In this course we will explore both the mysterious expansiveness and the grittily-detailed physicality of islands through the poems of Kathleen Jamie, Roseanne Watt, Iain Crichton Smith, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, and Jen Hadfield. We will look at how poems themselves are a kind of island on the page, and how the white space around a poem can hold resonances, stories, complexities. We will even try writing in the voice of an island – how would an island speak? What might it say? And how might we bring the raw edge of wildness into our poems?
We will start each session with a talk about one of the ideas outlined above, before reading some inspirational poems, exploring how the poets variously use voice, form, white space, tone, or the element of surprise to play with those ideas and possibilities. We will then complete some in-class writing, with time to read this new work aloud, and possibly also for some immediate, off-the-cuff feedback. In the final, fifth, session, we will have a workshop where participants will offer one of the poems they have written during the course for feedback from the group and from myself.
This will be a course that explores what poetry can hold in its concision, precision, and detail. How poems, like islands, can hold mystery and expansiveness in one hand, and a deeply grounded physicality in the other.
5 fortnightly Zoom sessions on Thursdays, 7–9pm (BST/GMT), starts 17 Oct 2024. 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: @theplanetspeaks
About Lynn Davidson 
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Lynn Davidson writes poetry, memoir, essays, and fiction. Her memoir Do you still have time for chaos? was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press, Wellington, in 2024. Her latest poetry collection Islander was published by Shearsman Books, Bristol, and Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2019. Lynn had a Hawthornden Fellowship, Scotland, in 2013 and a Bothy Project Residency, Scotland, in 2016. She won the Poetry New Zealand Poetry Award, 2020, and was the Randell Cottage Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence, 2021, and the Mike Riddell Writer in Residence, 2023. Lynn’s essays and poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, London, New Writing Scotland, Glasgow, Cordite and Text, Melbourne, and Sport and Verb, Wellington. Lynn calls Aotearoa New Zealand and Scotland home.
"It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say Poetry School has been transformative for me both personally and poetically."
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