Groups

Writer and filmmaker Ross Sutherland will create thirty new works over March and April 2015. Each work will be a synthesis of poetry and video, exploring the different ways that the two mediums can shape and influence the other. Ross is travelling across the UK throughout this period, completing a national tour of his theatre show, Standby For Tape Backup. Hence, the project also doubles as a poetic tour diary. Ross will use the project to respond to the places he visits and the people he meets.

In this public group, CAMPUS students can also provide Ross with materials to respond to, as well as create their own work in response. Ross will be casting his magpie eyes over CAMPUS looking for raw materials that he can fashion into one of the 30 film-poems he’ll be making as part of his digital residency.

In particular, Ross wants to find out what inspires us as individuals – our personal muses and private obsessions. Ross is asking CAMPUS for prompts, provocations and creative suggestions to help stimulate new ideas for films, and to push him in new and unlikely directions.

The rules. You may consider sharing:

– Photos (personal, or public domain/archive)
– Video (personal, or public domain/archive)
– Songs/audio clips of music and field recordings
– Favourite poems by other people
– Found text (page of a website, or a photo of text)
– Overheard conversations
– Interesting articles and links

You can also ask Ross questions and suggest personal challenges or restrictions (no ice buckets please!)

CAMPUS members can also share a poem of their own with Ross, but this should be done with discretion. Furthermore, Ross reserves the right not to use any of the material he is sent.

If you’d like to share something with Ross, please upload it – at any time – to the 30 Poems / 30 Videos group on CAMPUS (you’ll need to join the group to do this). Ross will be checking the group regularly.

Any member of CAMPUS caught violating Community Guidelines, or using this group to conspicuously advertise projects of their own will be removed.

This five-session course is open to anyone who wishes to participate in playing and experimenting with poetic forms, styles, and genres. Taking a range of starting points, we will open up ideas of what poetry is, with a view to stimulating your writing and sharing in discussion. We will read poems by several writers whose writing has brought fresh impetus to poetry. Each participant will engage with a palette that may enrich or clarify their own poetry.

Please make sure you have paid for this course before requesting group membership.

How might we eschew a life built upon lies, secrets and silence? And how might a “queer” poetics free us of our emotional chains?

What do long poems bring out of the poet’s voice that shorter verse cannot? A lot of workshops are all about editing work down to size and keeping things concise; on this online course we will be pushing poetry to its limits and generating work over 40 lines, the cut-off point for many magazines and competitions. Over 5 months we will explore specific poems – such as Toby Martinez De Las Rivas’s ‘Twenty-One Prayers for Weak or Fabulous Things’, Lucie Brock-Broido’s ‘Domestic Mysticism’, Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’, Kate Tempest’s ‘Brand New Ancients’ – and consider why these poems work as longer poems, their tempo, tone and use of repetition, exaggeration and stylisation, and also how on a larger scale poems can work without being over-written. We’ll then work ways in and out of our own long poems, learning how to keep up the stamina it takes to keep our lines limber and flowing, and how narrative structure, lists, meditations on reflective ideas, incantations, and invoking the mystical and metaphysical can yield grand results.

‘A poem is like a much, much richer joke’ – Adam Zagajewski. On this course, you’ll look at some seriously funny poems by the likes of Glyn Maxwell, Simon Armitage, Thomas Lux, Jo Shapcott and Carol Ann Duffy, exploring a range of approaches to the comic, considering aspects such as narrative, allegory and the use of the surreal. You’ll look at a range of forms, such as the sonnet and the villanelle, and how they can be used to shift a comic poem into seriousness; and how the use of everyday life and characters can result in strange and original comic impacts. Looking at ‘crossover’ writers such as Benjamin Zephaniah and John Cooper Clarke, this course will also seek to bridge the relationship between ‘page’ and ‘performance’ poetry, seeking similarities rather than differences in how both employ comic techniques. Lastly, you will look at what in literary terms is often seen as ‘bad’ comic poetry, while seeking to develop our own comic poems which, while they will hopefully make people smile or laugh, will go far beyond the confines of what is traditionally considered as light verse.

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

Don’t worry, this is not a class for precocious school students, but an opportunity to explore different sorts of poetic form, and to challenge yourself to write according to the unique conventions, restrictions and freedoms of each particular form. Many people have tried sonnets and villanelles, but what about the sestina, the pantoum, the ghazal? Or blank verse, elegy, ode? We’ll look at examples (drawn from a wide range of writers) and you’ll generate new work, sharing drafts in progress with the group and receiving feedback based on close reading of your work. We’ll also ‘off-road’ and look at unusual versions of certain poetic forms, to explore how flexible and innovative form can be.

Think of all the rules you’ve heard in poetry workshops: Show don’t tell. Be more concise. Restrain your use of adverbs and adjectives. On this Open Workshop with Kathryn Maris, you’ll be ripping up the workshop rulebook with a roguish disregard for good taste and ‘respectable’ writing. With the help of a step-by-step assignment devised by Kathryn, you will write a poem in which you wilfully ignore all the usual workshop advice and wisdom, using material re-worked from Kathryn’s ‘Breaking the Rules’ course to guide you. Feeling anarchic?

CAMPUS – the social network for poets – is hosting its first ever Digital Open Day on Wednesday 7 May 2014. If you’re currently a CAMPUS member or thinking about joining our community, this is best way to find out more, interact with other poets, as well as a rare opportunity to peek into our many secret vaults. It’s also a great chance for students new to our online course programme to experience peer-to-peer learning first-hand.

Full list of events here: http://campus.poetryschool.com/campus-digital-open-day/

Email [email protected] to find out more.

Cause disquiet, increase tension and leave a shadow of violence on your reader that lingers long after the closing line

Bring the process of essay writing closer to the sensibility of the lyric form

Turn to the living oral literature of stand-up comedy for lessons that apply to your poems

Set sail on an adventure to craft poems for young audiences.

This is a closed group for students enrolled on Ros Barber’s Saturday Sessions. To join this group, please contact [email protected]

An online staffroom for Poetry School tutors. Bring your own biscuits.

Take a playful approach to the possibilities of form and learn to free your writing processes.

An advanced online course demonstrating the value of omission, redaction, aphorism and minimalism, and broadening your ideas of what is and isn’t a poem.

Forage in the undergrowth for new poems on history, folklore and all things wild

Explore the plural possibilities of extending your poetry into sequences

Twist and reshape fairytales, the tales from your childhoods and adulthoods

Flip writer’s block on its head and turn lack of inspiration into a source for creative ideas