Groups

What small objects keep you awake at night, and which ones do you often lose, or have intimate relationships with? What was the last genuinely challenging idea you heard or read about? In this new Open Workshop, poet Simon Pomery will encourage you to take objects, preferably small ones with little or no poetical history, and try to link them to ideas outside of poetry. You will learn ways of breaking your syntax and experimenting with thought patterns, and read poems that will hopefully inspire you into establishing contact between things and ideas.

For more info: http://campus.poetryschool.com/open-workshop-invisible-dark-matter/

Editing Lab: Consider the challenges, practical ‘nuts and bolts’ and decision-making processes in putting together your own pamphlet publication.

Used in its modern context, confinement refers to a state of being limited or constricted. It’s rarer, and older definition however relates to ‘the condition of being in childbirth”. This clash of meanings will be the source of this workshop as we explore ways in which the restrictive elements of our lived experiences, our identities and our histories, can also give birth to new forms of creativity and expression.

On this Open Workshop (they’re back!) we’ll look at contemporary poetry from writers like Yesenia Montilla, Ocean Vuong and Danez Smith that grapples with the overlapping worlds of literal and conceptual confinement, where the landscapes of queer identities, migrant identities and more collide to provide new ways to discuss selfhood. This workshop is for anyone that wants to use poetry to explore the freedoms hidden in the identities they feel confined by.

An intensive studio course on bad language, bad form and bad taste.

Write on Lynchian themes, including dreams, identity, sexuality and the supernatural world of love.

Explore the boundaries of writing from, about and naming desire

Use philosophical concepts to sharpen your poetry, and poetry to bring those concepts to life

An advanced online course investigating and mastering the elegy

Develop your own language of survival & explore how to write in a way which nourishes and gives shape to chaos

How can poetry speak to us if it does not take risks, say something bold and new, make adventurous leaps with language and form?

This is the closed group for students enrolled on the Poetry School’s MA in Writing Poetry in partnership with Newcastle University, 2016/18, and studying in London.

Embrace multiple languages in your poetry and challenge the boundaries between domestic and foreign.

Peer into the world of science and scientists to gather inspiration for new poems

Equip yourself to adjust the nuts and bolts that account for the sound of a line

Avoid plagiarism, but explore the creative activity of appropriation and “stealing”

Translate the felt world into poetry and write work of the body

How can poetry respond to ecological disaster and its far-reaching repercussions?

Writer and filmmaker Ross Sutherland will create thirty new works over March and April 2015. Each work will be a synthesis of poetry and video, exploring the different ways that the two mediums can shape and influence the other. Ross is travelling across the UK throughout this period, completing a national tour of his theatre show, Standby For Tape Backup. Hence, the project also doubles as a poetic tour diary. Ross will use the project to respond to the places he visits and the people he meets.

In this public group, CAMPUS students can also provide Ross with materials to respond to, as well as create their own work in response. Ross will be casting his magpie eyes over CAMPUS looking for raw materials that he can fashion into one of the 30 film-poems he’ll be making as part of his digital residency.

In particular, Ross wants to find out what inspires us as individuals – our personal muses and private obsessions. Ross is asking CAMPUS for prompts, provocations and creative suggestions to help stimulate new ideas for films, and to push him in new and unlikely directions.

The rules. You may consider sharing:

– Photos (personal, or public domain/archive)
– Video (personal, or public domain/archive)
– Songs/audio clips of music and field recordings
– Favourite poems by other people
– Found text (page of a website, or a photo of text)
– Overheard conversations
– Interesting articles and links

You can also ask Ross questions and suggest personal challenges or restrictions (no ice buckets please!)

CAMPUS members can also share a poem of their own with Ross, but this should be done with discretion. Furthermore, Ross reserves the right not to use any of the material he is sent.

If you’d like to share something with Ross, please upload it – at any time – to the 30 Poems / 30 Videos group on CAMPUS (you’ll need to join the group to do this). Ross will be checking the group regularly.

Any member of CAMPUS caught violating Community Guidelines, or using this group to conspicuously advertise projects of their own will be removed.

This five-session course is open to anyone who wishes to participate in playing and experimenting with poetic forms, styles, and genres. Taking a range of starting points, we will open up ideas of what poetry is, with a view to stimulating your writing and sharing in discussion. We will read poems by several writers whose writing has brought fresh impetus to poetry. Each participant will engage with a palette that may enrich or clarify their own poetry.

Please make sure you have paid for this course before requesting group membership.

How might we eschew a life built upon lies, secrets and silence? And how might a “queer” poetics free us of our emotional chains?