Groups

A course for beginners and intermediate writers who want structured learning about rhyme, metre, verse forms, lineation and stanzas.

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 before you take Tammy’s course).

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. Autumn guests, subject to confirmation, will include Amy Key (Luxe) and William Wootten (poet and literary critic).

A ground-breaking collaboration between Newcastle University and the Poetry School: a new Masters degree in Writing Poetry, leading to the award of an MA from Newcastle University. Starting September 2015, this two year part-time course will be based in two centres. You can study at the Poetry School in London, or at Newcastle University itself via a combination of small groups and individual teaching. Both groups of students will come together for an annual joint Summer School, alternating between London and Newcastle. London tutors will be Roddy Lumsden and Clare Pollard; Newcastle tutors include Sean O’Brien and W N Herbert – and both teaching centres will benefit from guest tutor visits from the Poetry School’s established teaching faculty.

Outlandish visions, cartoon physics and dream logic to enliven your poetry.

Pack a bag. We’re going on a field trip. After a tour of all our favourite writing spots, we’ll set out to locate the places where our poems happen. On this course we’ll revisit the sites of ms. We’ll learn how to build poems on the move and how to read poems that are stuck to one specific spot. We’ll take all our provisions along with us. Alice Oswald’s nightbook. Sean Borodale’s beekeeper’s veil. A handful of Emily Dickinson’s envelopes. Richard Long’s walking map. And we won’t need to go far. Most of us write at our desks, on the bus, in our beds. These are rich and peculiar landscapes that roll under our work. We just need to stay put and explore.

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.