Groups

The natural world has long been a site of fascination and wonder for poets. But how do we write our surroundings now – whether urban or rural – at a time when the human impact on the environment is at its most acute? Taking poetry that responds to the complexities of its surroundings from around the world as inspiration and example, we will read a range of poets including A R Ammons, Liz Berry, Tom Chivers, Lucille Clifton, David Constantine, Camille Dungy, John Kinsella, W S Merwin, Pablo Neruda, Pascale Petit and Gary Snyder. Through close readings and a range of practical exercises, this course will explore how we might approach the pressing global complexities of the 21st century to create poems that are fresh, engaging and politically alert.

30 poets, 27 gardens, 1 Open Garden Squares Weekend. A group for our latest bouquet of garden poets.

As babies, the human face is the first thing that we learn to see and to interpret. The idea that we can capture a ‘likeness’ of a person, revealing key truths or fundamental aspects of their character in a single composition has always dominated world art, ever since early man scratched his own likeness. In this course we’ll be examining some of the techniques of portraiture and exploring how they can be applied to poetic composition, creating some of our own poetry silhouettes, caricatures and maybe even a selfie. We’ll also be considering the ethical questions that arise when we attempt to represent another person. What does it mean to have a sitter? What do the other objects and costumes in a portrait tell us about the subject? How do we negotiate the various gazes at work between the artist, the subject and the audience? Come and lock eyes with us, and maybe create some poems that will follow you around a room.

What are the contours of Romanticism beyond the ‘big six’ poets? There is no doubting the achievements of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake, or Byron, Shelley and Keats: but their poetry sprang from a culture as infinitely rich and various as their verse itself, marked by social ferment and the radical ideas of revolutionaries in Europe and the Americas. On this reading course, poet and academic Dan Eltringham leads you down some of the green lanes and byways of British Romanticism, from its roots in 18th century loco-descriptive, agrarian, pastoral and georgic poetry, through its lesser-known poets, thinkers and artists. Setting the familiar Romantic poets in their broader social and artistic contexts, we will encounter on the road the rural cadences of William Cowper and the botanical precision of Charlotte Smith (both great influences on Wordsworth), the neglected Lake Poet Robert Southey, the mysterious Scottish Bard ‘Ossian’, John Clare’s anti-enclosure poetry, and the work of marginalized female poets such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Dorothy Wordsworth. The course also glances ahead to the legacy of Romanticism in British and American poetry and aesthetics, and will consider Romantic visual art from Constable and Turner onwards.

Have you been writing prose poetry and want to strengthen your practice, your poems? Advanced Prose Poetry aims to help practitioners raise their game by looking closely at sentence structure, length and rhythms, and exploring different approaches to the prose poem: the use of a controlling metaphor, narrative, and the surreal, among others. We will also consider full-length collections of prose poetry (a reading list will be sent in advance). Chat sessions will sometimes focus on new writing, sometimes on new ideas, and always involve stimulating discussion. Applicants must submit two prose poems in advance to show their ability in the form. Poems will be judged anonymously.

Doesn’t inspiration feel good? The rush of language, the flash of illumination, the racing to the notebook or computer or phone to write it down as if taking dictation from a god or muse? It happens, like lightning, but poets can’t count on it, even if they persistently wait in the rain. We have no way of knowing how our best work is going to practices that might get us there. Each week, we’ll explore poems that seem driven by various modes, experiences, and procedures, such as poems driven by narrative, by sound, by form; poems that have something urgent to communicate; poems that happen mathematically (through addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division); and poems that come about by jazzing around with language. Then we’ll try out all of these approaches and make them our own. Poets represented in the readings will include Gertrude Stein, Harryette Mullen, John Ashbery, Joe Brainard, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Jane Yeh. This workshop is designed for students at all levels of experience.

Is writing about your child always boring or saccharine? Or can poems about parenthood say important things about love, life and death? Was Cyril Connolly right to claim that ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,’ or can children actually be a rich source of inspiration? Each session, you will look at parenthood from a different angle – through pregnancy, identity, language and letting go. We’ll discuss lullabies and Lorca; Sharon Olds’ ‘Brag’ about childbirth and Coleridge’s sleepless nights; Edward Lear’s ‘Dong with a luminous nose’ and the politics of parenting. There will be lots to read and a writing exercise each week to (hopefully) prove Connolly wrong. (This is a repeat of a course that has run previously).

In The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction, American poet Dean Young urges us to play apart from obsessions with ‘craft’ when we write. He exclaims ‘We are making birds not birdcages’. Let’s take that as our rallying cry. The lifeblood of these sessions will be encounters with innovative contemporary poems, cycles of generative ‘obstructions,’ and conversations about what you create. Expect that ours will be an unconventional, provocative space devoted to experimentation and the invention of new forms.

This is a Campus group associated with Tamar Yoseloff’s Routes into Poetry course, a place for course members to share work, resources and conversation.

Course description: This course is appropriate for beginners and those who have written some poetry but who would like to take a more structured approach to their writing. You will examine the basics of rhyme, metre, verse forms, lineation and stanza structure. Through exercises, reading, writing and feedback, you will also begin to construct a voice, to create shapes on the page and develop your first drafts with confidence. (If you are
a complete beginner, we recommend you download our course How to Write Poetry.)

In a letter, Robert Lowell once told Elizabeth Bishop that ‘Irony is being amusing about what we can’t understand.’ Lowell’s description might chime with many poetry fans who find contemporary poetry quirky but hard to grasp. This course will explore the increasingly fraught relationship with sincerity and self-expression that poetry has developed over the last 60 years, from Frank O’Hara and Paul Muldoon to millennial poetry on either side of the Atlantic and work showcased in the anthology ‘Dear World and Everyone in It’. Readings and related writing exercises will help you to appreciate writing that questions itself and pushes back against tired convention, both in poetry and the wider language. It will be a perfect fit for anyone looking to bring some contemporary edge to work that might currently feel too safe and traditional to grab an editor’s attention. (This is a repeat of a course that has run previously.)

Spoken word and film poems are on the rise, celebrated artists are working with voice, script and sound in innovative ways, and Radio 4 – the most famous talk radio station in the world – now even has an official Poet in Residence. But what are the skills needed to make poems or poetic drama for sound alone (either live radio or recording), when the performer is not entirely present? In this course, we are each others’ audience. You will make recordings with and for each other, memorise our poems as actors do, and learn to convey images and sounds that are dramatic to the ear, formalising what we’ve done into scripts. Inspired by work from sound installations by Lavinia Greenlaw for Artangel to Dylan Thomas’s original radio verse play Under Milk Wood, from spoken word shows on the radio to the inclusion of a spoken word segment in the magazine show Saturday Live, we will write new radio-ready poems and mini verse dramas sensitive to changes of pitch and tempo, mutter and oration, utilising stage directions, sound effects, and recaps for listeners tuning in late – all while never straying too far from voice and the play of voices, and always being respectful to the raw conditions of sound.

Worldbuilding is the lifeblood of narrative, and as poets and storytellers we spend the best part of our time thinking about the places, history, culture and mores of our own fictional worlds. On this course, you will create your own poetic ‘storyworld’ and use poetry to gradually reveal its details – money, clothing, territorial boundaries, tribal customs, building materials, what people eat, what it smells like after it rains, etc. We will look at classic examples from the genres of fantasy and science fiction as a starting point, such as Westeros, Middle-earth, Earthsea, Zembla, Narnia – each of which has its own poetic culture that serves to bring the main narrative to life – and write poems and text, draw maps, and imagine the lost works of our imaginary canons, inspired by our imaginary places. We will also look at the influence of folk songs and traditional poetry on writers such as Borges and Tolkien, while examining other mythopoeia created by Blake, Eliot and less well known poets, to create a body of work that questions the notion of authorship and makes new connections in your poetry.

A group for sharing poetry created during Pangaea Poetry’s #PROMPT videos, or for discussing the topics in #SOCIALCALL videos. Or just for the community in general. Come see who’s here!

Have you ever thought of turning your poems into a short film or Youtube video? Poetry films – or ‘filmpoems’ – merge two genres to create a new piece of art, and through the hybridisation, augment and extend both genres.

In this Open Workshop, Eleni Cay will cover basic techniques for creating poetryfilms, and video poetry, and will challenge you to create your own poetry video. We will jointly explore which poems are most suitable for filmpoetry, how to identify the right platform to create your own filmpoem and the right channel for sharing it with others. This Open Workshop is open to all poets, particularly those with minimal knowledge of making films or feeling less comfortable with technology.

The Poetry School and the London Parks and Gardens Trust have hybridised! As part of London Open Gardens Weekend (13-14 June) we are offering the chance for you to take part in your own garden-based residencies. You’ll be paired up with anything from an allotment to a garden square, and you can use the opportunity to write, perform, inspire or otherwise create poems following your own skills and interests. During the morning of the April session, Sarah (poet and Event Manager for London Open Garden Squares Weekend) and Julia from the Poetry School will explore some residency options and styles with you, and allocate the gardens. In the afternoon, we’ll work on some garden-themed writing exercises to propagate your green and leafy poetry ideas. You don’t need to have had previous poet-in-residence experience to take part in this project, but you do need to be writing at an advanced level and be able to organise and carry out the particulars of your own residency.

We often talk about the musicality of poems, but it’s rare to see that many poems directly inspired by music. An offshoot of Rishi’s ‘Call and Response’ Summer School workshop, this online reading group – or rather, online listening group – aims to remedy that. Over ten weeks we’ll range across a variety of different styles and genres – hip hop, jazz, indie, pop and much, much more – listening to some hits and some maybe some misses too. And we’ll delve not just into the lyrics of great songwriters, but also think about the traditions they reflect, the subjects and themes they articulate and the sonic landscapes they work in. Each time we’ll cue up a new playlist and use what we listen to, and some writing prompts, as the basis to inspire new poems. And when you next hear a song, you might even think, “There’s a poem in that.”

In this genre-bending course, we will look at poets, fiction writers, philosophers and psychoanalysts who think and write in fragments, use modes of interruption or whose work simply survives in fragment form. Fortnightly reading and writing assignments will aim to broaden your ideas of what is and isn’t a poem, demonstrate the value of omission and the unstated, and suggest new ways of observing yourself and the world, and of communicating those observations. The course will include texts by Sappho, Lydia Davis, Kimko Hahn, Simone Weil, Adam Phillips, Wallace Stevens, Theodor Adorno, Gertrude Stein, Sam Riviere, Nuar Alsadir, Simon Smith, Anne Carson and others. (This is a repeat of a course that has run previously.)

Effort, toil, task, job, labour, slog, chore, drudgery, exertion. In an article published by Jeremy Seabrook in The Guardian in 2013 he argues that “Words indicating labour in most European languages originate in an imagery of compulsion, torment, affliction and persecution”. How has our concept of work changed and how have contemporary poets tackled this subject? Using Philip Levine’s beautiful poem ‘What Work Is’ as our touchstone, we will set off exploring this question to expand our definition of what work is or can be. We will look at how poets have written about work and write our own poetry about this thing that we will spend, on average 90,000 hours of our lives doing. We’ll also be thinking about useful and meaningful work, and how the right work can be essential to poets, exploring the ideas of the Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez on what the true ‘work’ of a poet is. Throughout the course we will be moving towards creating our own ‘poetics of work’.

The image is a poem’s engine; for poets, writing fresh and powerful imagery, encouraging the reader to think about the content of a poem in more than one way, is a joyful experience. On this course we’ll look at how poets use figurative language; how to avoid safe/predictable tropes in favour of daring/surprising imagery; the role of the physical senses; simile and metaphor, synecdoche and how/when to use these devices; the role of symbolism in poetry, and how certain poets – e.g. Wallace Stevens – use encoded symbolism in their work; image clusters; the extended metaphor; and audacious metaphors/the conceit. We’ll read lots of examples of published poetry and try different strategies/approaches to push ourselves out of our comfort zones to create whole new ‘image banks’ for new work.

The late mediaeval/early modern English translations of the Bible are among the fundamental texts — alongside Beowulf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare — of English literature, comprising an unrivalled treasure-house of content, themes, forms and techniques that contemporary poets might appropriate and incorporate into their work. On this course, you will identify characteristic Biblical literary techniques such as parallelism, repetition, rhetorical questions, precise lexis, compression and economy, patterns of imagery, distinctive approaches to conjunctions/prepositions and much more, writing your own poems under their influence, as well as considering the distinctive content of the various texts and the parallels between the verse structures of the original Biblical languages and Old English prosody. Key texts, pre-sessional reading and other necessary contextual material will be made available before the course starts.