Groups

How does poetry reach towards a new understanding of the unknown?

Perhaps now more than ever, our poetry should engage with news and global events.

Learn how to edit, cut and redraft your poems.

If you know you want to write, but you need a structured introduction to poetry’s possibilities, this is the course for you. Liane will inspire you to write your own poems through guided and structured reading, analysis and discussion of poems by poets whose names begin with the letter A, B, or C (Akhmahtova, Bishop, Carver etc), and you will learn the ABCs of writing poetry (shaping the line, trying out form, drawing on the resources of prosody, controlling tone and voice) along the way.

A group for students to chat between sessions.

Learn how using plain English can be anything but plain.

Artists use notebooks to both explore and record their creative journey. These books often become artefacts in their own right, incorporating mixed media, found objects, words and images. This process is something that poets can also benefit from. On this course you will collect materials to use in creating your own set of poems, producing a handmade book that contains your poem and its unique journey. There will be an exhibition of the books at the end of the course.

Create new work about your own islands – be they tropical or polar; of the mind or rising from a boiling sea.

Do you have a heap of discarded poems which just won’t work no matter how many revisions you make? The Poetry School’s Feedback Courses provide a place for the general improvement of left-for-dead poems in need of resuscitation. Bring poems of any shape or size once a fortnight and receive detailed feedback from your tutor and general advice from fellow students. These courses are ideal for those looking to ready poems for magazine submission.

Close readings, analysis and interpretations. Got a new take on an old favourite? Fancy annotating a contemporary classic? Come share your ideas and show off your powers of literary criticism. For those new to explication, there are useful guides here: http://web.uvic.ca/~englblog/closereading/ & here: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/second/en227/closereading/

Stirred by restlessness, pushed by history, / I found myself in the centre of Empire – James Berry. The current refugee crisis has made migration both a constant and contested topic of discussion, and this course will prompt us to take a long view of migration. The movement of humans over borders – geographical, cultural and linguistic – has a long and multifaceted history, and much poetry has been written about migration – from leaving and journeys, to reimagining or reconstructing the old country from a point in a diaspora. We will consider a range of poetic narratives addressing first and second generation experience, reasons for leaving, thoughts of return, memory and nostalgia. We will read poems as prompts to write our own. This course will suit writers of all levels.

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A place to share reviews of notable and interesting poetry books by other people.

Be inspired by, and pay homage to the work of other poets.

A Campus group for students on ‘Freedom within Constraint’ with Rachael Allen.

All poems are written within a kind of form or framework, even free verse, and many poets find it highly generative to employ specific constraints in their writing. Through studying example poems, engaging with writing tasks and playing with procedure and device, this course will look at ways to experiment with poetic constraints and open up new pathways in your own writing, including sessions on prose poems, oulipo and various formal constraints.

2016 marks a century of Dada. Conceived the same year as the Battle of the Somme, Dada was a short-lived, brilliant reaction against the political and cultural oppression of the early 1900s. Dada revolutionised the way art was made and thought about, pioneering many new techniques – sound poetry, photomontage, readymades, and more. On this new online course, we will try to re-capture some of the energy of the original Dada explosion, creating anarchic, surprising and daring poetry using Dadaist techniques. It is easy to see how this particular moment in our history has many parallels with today’s global political landscape, with current wars and conflicts, fiercely heightened global inequality, unprecedented developments in science and physics, and the need for a rigorous new poetic intervention to shake up the complacency and political apathy we can see around us. We’ll re-examine the philosophies of Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Cioran and Adorno to create our own aphorisms, manifestos, vignettes, and we will use free-association, erasure, ‘anti-meditation’, and automatic writing to create our own forms of revolutionary anti-poetry.

Three lines, syllable counting, nature, Zen. Now, we’ve got those crusty preconceptions and outdated rules out of the way we can take a fresh look at English language haiku in the light of contemporary Western practice. On this intensive 3 week writing course we will re-visit the most misunderstood of all the poetic forms – the haiku – looking at work by experienced practitioners in the UK and USA. We will then practice some techniques that contribute towards making the ordinary extraordinary, writing our own small epiphanies, tiny elegies and snapshots from our daily lives that are charged with clarity, emotion and humour. We will also be setting both our pens and as well as our bodies in motion, as we follow in the footsteps of Basho and compose our haiku while walking, taking advantage of the dramatic changes of the autumn season.

In this Studio course, we’ll be looking at The Blues — that repurposing of sadness & grief into joy and celebration. We’ll find inspiration from blues rhythms and verses, starting with the traditional blues form and then working through a series of exercises that explode the blues in interesting and innovative new ways, while still encompassing all those things that make the blues what it is: melancholy yet soulful, a way of reflecting on emotional pain with heightened heart and music. When poets have radially experimented with the sonnet beyond recognition – why not the blues? From the prison poems of Etheridge Knight, to the Stax-influenced work of Cornelius Eddy, to the surreal and celebratory work of Mary Ruefle we’ll look at how the blues has influenced poetry and will influence yours.

This advanced course will focus on the development of your own poetry through weekly homework exercises and in-depth feedback on your poems in progress. Up to four visiting poets during the term will give a short reading or discussion their work, answer questions, and offer feedback on student poems.