Groups

This course will look closely at how poems can be provoked or prompted, considering how ‘constraints’, whether formal or thematic, can actually release and stimulate the imagination. We will explore emulation and modelling from other poems, as well as using other texts (film, music, art) as inspiration. We’ll also consider old and new poetic forms, exploring the link between form and content. This class will involve both writing exercises in class and at home and will offer feedback on participants’ writing alongside the broader discussions.

Over three terms, this course, which is suitable for poets who already grasp the basics of form and rhythm, will look at the structural, musical and metrical aspects of contemporary poetry. The broad subjects of the three terms are metrics (with a focus on the sonnet), musicality and non-metrical forms. Students will be encouraged to write poems which fit in with the work discussed and try established and invented forms.

If Heidigger was right to assert that ‘we never come to thoughts, they come to us’, or William Butler Yeats ‘… all thought becomes image’, then what could create more fertile ground for poetry than a roomful of poets wrestling with and responding to the ideas of great thinkers? You’ll look at selected short papers by thinkers from a range of disciplines – Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Physics, Medicine and Astronomy – and formulate your own poetic responses to them. ‘The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.’ John Keats.

A closed group for those taking part in the New Writing North / Poetry School New Poets’ Bursaries Programme

Are you an up and coming poet with 15-30 poems under your belt? You may be ready for a first pamphlet competition or be eligible for The Society of Authors Eric Gregory Awards for poets under 30. Eric Gregory Award Winner, Saradha, will guide you through 30 editing tools and writing strategies to present your best poems in the best order and increase your chances of making the shortlist. You’ll be guided towards selecting poems that linger and discover sequencing techniques to seduce your reader, and learn how to identify your signature poem and enhance your poetic style. There will be the opportunity to develop your critical muscles and discuss queries and presentation issues with the group through CAMPUS. The final session will be dedicated to sustaining your creative practice and managing your next steps.

Please make sure you have paid for this course before requesting group membership. For more information: http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/face-to-face/winning-ways-to-make-the-shortlist.php

The Poetry School is out of the office. All the workshops and sessions in this year’s Summer School have a holiday theme. We asked our poet tutors to think about the difference between a tourist, a traveller and a resident. What happens when you can’t speak the lingo of your holiday destination, we asked them; is the best part of going away coming home? Though playful in approach, the week of activities they’ve invented provides in-depth and inspiring advice and guidance for new poems. Consider the effect that two weeks away from work has on you. Just one of our holiday workshops will have the same effect on your poems! Come to as many or as few sessions as you like – our Summer School is open for those who fancy a poetic mini-break as well as those who want the equivalent of a round the world cruise. At the end of the week, the Poetry School classrooms will be filled with notes, drafts, images and reflections from all the sessions, and everyone will be welcome to join the Poetry School holiday reps and your fellow travellers for a drink on the Friday night to celebrate. We’ll swap tales of tan lines and holiday romances, and give each other our holiday souvenirs.

Cinema has changed the way we view the world. Inspired by film and the way that it coerces us into reimaging our lives behind the lens, this course will explore the writing of ‘genre’ poetry. Focusing on Westerns, Apocalyptic Disaster, Film Noir, Romantic Comedies, and Horror, this course will inspire you to tell your life stories in poetic form as though they were set within these genres. As the first poetry course with a viewing list as long as its reading list, by the end you’ll have a sequence of poems that take in everything from shoot-outs at dawn, climate change, alien invasion, pessimistic private eyes, quirky love affairs and dark slasher thrillers. This is a course for film and poetry lovers.

To book your place on this course, please go to: http://tinyurl.com/youthemovie

We will read, discuss and write poems concerning bodies, not only to explore poetry ABOUT bodies, but to uncover the essential embodiedness of poetry; how it emerges from our own rhythms and sounds, from the very bounds of our being. So, poems about our physical being, our well-being, health and medicine, but also about the shape and sound of being human. Expect exercises,discussion, reading, writing and workshopping poems in progress.

In these sessions you will look at different approaches to writing lyric poetry from across the C20th. Beginning with the modernist focus on ‘images’ and ‘things’ in Imagism and Objectivism, you’ll then move on to read, write and workshop poems through the lenses of Sur / Realist, Formalist, Postmodern, and Experimental ideas and examples. The course will therefore have a focus on using different techniques and processes, and will push you outside of your usual ways of writing. You’ll experiment with some playful processes and structures, as well as exploring the imagination / subconscious in relation to the formal. And your subject-matter? Limitless!

Collaborative group for members of the “Maintenant!” course

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.

W.B. Yeats once dismissed the work of a ‘minor poet’ with the words, ‘he lacks chaos’. Although Yeats did not precisely define what he meant by ‘chaos’, it seems clear that he sought to combine in the term something like the position, attitude and visionary striving from which arises the distinctive voice that informs and defines a poet’s characteristic expression — and which constitutes their occult genius. ‘Liberating Poetic Chaos’ is a course designed to enable poets to identify, explore and write from their own particular ‘chaos’ including consideration of parallel or related concepts, including voice, viveza, mala leche, gnosis, vision, ‘thorn-in-the-flesh’, muse, duende and inspiration.

This is the first in a new series of online courses suitable for international students, as well as those based in the UK. They are the same as our interactive online courses, however there are no live chats (all feedback is written) and the courses can be completed from any time zone.

‘Translating is reading, reading of the best, the most essential kind’, wrote William H. Gass introducing the concept of ‘transreading’. Would you like to read beyond Herbert, Holub, Popa, Šalamun or Szymborska, writing your own translations and independent poems? In this course you will respond to  recent work by Central European poets, strengthening your knowledge of other literatures and invigorating your own  poetry. You don’t need to speak Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian or Slovenian – all you need is curiosity and a love of anything trans: transmigration, transgression, transfiguration. Every fortnight you will experiment with one ‘rewriting strategy’ (homophonic translation, erasure, annotation, recontextualization) and transform the texts you’ve read into your own versions. Your fifth and final poem will be a ‘straight’ translation from a Polish crib, which will evolve into a collaborative work composed by the whole group.

To book your place on this course, please go to: http://tinyurl.com/transreadingcentraleurope

Stramash is a private group set up in 2014 by attendees of a Poetry School online course on autobiographical poetry run by Katrina Naomi. We don’t accept new members (other than by invitation from the group). Our aim is to provide a supportive environment and “fierce” criticism of each other’s work.

Staggering in its imaginative scope, haunting in its explorations of human passion and character, Dante’s Divine Comedy is often described as the greatest poem ever written. It’s been translated many times and has been a colossal influence on English language writers. Starting with a brief overview, this course will look in detail at some of the most famous and moving episodes in translations by different modern poets and will show how Dante has influenced writers like Yeats, Eliot and Seamus Heaney. We will explore how Dante can feed your own writing and will discuss poems produced by the group. No one will be put under pressure to put work forward, though, and so the course should suit both people whose essential interest is in reading and those who want to develop their own writing skills.

Please make sure you have paid for this course before requesting group membership. For more information: http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/face-to-face/rewriting-dante.php

Ventriloquism: the art or practice of speaking in such a manner that the voice does not appear to come from a speaker but from another source. From bus shelters to Biblical characters, taking in animals, weather, famous portraits and numberless other representations of silenced peoples, poetry has a long history of ventriloquism. Referring to contemporary and historical examples in poetry; we’ll look at why poets might want to speak in voices other than their own. We’ll find material in visual art, mythology, and social history; as well as personal artefacts and stories. As we address the possibility that we can speak for all people and all things, we’ll explore the freedom – and the ethical dilemmas – that this approach opens up for us. This course is suitable for new writers looking for inspiration, fun, and support – and for experienced writers who want to expand their focus and to explore the complexities that may arise when the poet’s voice is ‘thrown’ into other people’s stories. One guest session led by poet, visual artist and creative writing tutor Janine Pinion.

Please make sure you have paid for this course before requesting group membership. For more information: http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/face-to-face/instructions-for-throwing-your-voice.php

Loss is part of our lives from the moment we are born. Some losses are inevitable, many are welcome, some tear us apart. Each is unique yet universal. Loss has inspired the world’s greatest literature. We will look at different approaches to writing about loss, illustrated in the work of poets from John Clare to Christopher Reid, Jackie Kay,
Kate Clanchy, and many others. Exercises which look at loss from a range of perspectives will be offered to stimulate writing both in the session and afterwards. Celebration and humour have a place alongside sadness, the global alongside the personal. Not a therapeutic course, but exploring the essence of being human.

Please make sure you have paid for this course before requesting group membership. For more information: http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/face-to-face/writing-your-losses.php

Some poems seem to sing themselves boldly from the page while others whisper or ramble, speak in code, eventually decrypting their meaning in our gut, or our mind’s eye. Some poets choose the stage for their poems, and others prefer the silent telling of print upon a page. Sometimes, people make sense of their own story through writing poems, and some give voice to others through the narrative they write. This short course allows participants to consider their own poetic voice: what it is and what are its strengths or constraints? You will be able to come to a better awareness of these things through participating in a range of listening, writing, feedback and discussion exercises. We will look a selection of narrative poems that have influenced us or our culture; will consider what makes some poems better for text or for performance; and we will listen to and compare styles of spoken word, and practice these, as well as taking some time to examine how to make better use of our physical voices. There will also be, of course, many opportunities to draft new poems and develop some of them.

Please make sure you have paid for this course before requesting group membership. For more information: http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/face-to-face/the-voice-in-the-poem.php

Archives are a rich source of inspiration for poetry, and we have world class archives of so many different kinds in London. And yet, they are often untapped as resources for creating and developing poetry. In this course Nick, currently Artist in Residence at London Metropolitan Archive, will lead you through a journey of discovery of London’s diverse archives and how to draw on their collections, and indeed your own personal archives, to create new pieces of poetry that can illuminate both history and our contemporary experience. This practical course will help you develop your poetry writing skills, explore new sources of inspiration, and how to turn documentary materials and archival items into rounded and realised poems. The course will include a tutored day on site at London Metropolitan Archive as part of the Streetlife London project.

Please make sure you have paid for this course before requesting group membership. For more information: http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/face-to-face/the-poetry-archivist.php

What effect do certain sounds have on us? What role does sound play in our significant memories? And what about music? Or silence? We’ll be exploring these questions through a series of listening and writing experiments spread over the 5 sessions. We’ll also be reading and discussing contemporary poems that respond to sounds and music both beautiful and ugly. There’ll be a chance to think about the silences and sounds inside your own poems and how they relate to rhyme in all its variety, and stanza and line break. You should come away with several poems-in-the-making and a plethora of ideas for approaching the subject, and there’ll be a chance in the later sessions to share your own work.

Please make sure you have paid for this course before requesting group membership. For more information: http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/face-to-face/sounds-and-sweet-airs.php