Groups

A private group for poets selected for the New North Poets scheme with The Poetry School and New Writing North. This group is for discussion between participants, Poetry School staff and your tutor, Clare Pollard. Live chats will also take place in this group.

Poetry is a platform, not an altar

The ghazal makes unique rhetorical demands on the Western writer. In our latest Open Workshop, Jason Schneiderman will be getting you to think through your ghazals and to explore the multiple ways to revise these modular poems. Do you enjoy finding a hand-crafted wooden puzzle in your Christmas stocking more than a satsuma? Prefer origami to sports? Then this may be the poetic challenge for you. Prepare to get crafty with your verse with this most elegant and versatile of forms.

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?