Open Workshop: ‘Reduce/Reuse/Recycle’

According to T.S. Eliot, mature poets steal where immature poets borrow. Stealing, here, doesn’t mean copying: rather, it means turning what you take from another writer ‘into something better, or at least something different’. It’s an appealing idea, but does it work?

In this Open Workshop with Adam Crothers, we will think about how to incorporate lines from other writers’ texts — not only poems, but novels, plays, films, TV series, songs — into our poetry and make them new, make them our own. We will explore the differences between polite quotation, daring theft and lazy plagiarism, and what happens when a piece of writing finds itself in a poem for which it wasn’t intended. We will drive it like we stole it, which we did.

Title: ‘Reduce/Reuse/Recycle’

START DATE: Thursday 5 May 2016

DEADLINE: Thursday 12 May 2016, 12noon

LIVE CHAT: Thursday 19 May 2016, 7:30-9:30pm GMT

To book your place, please email [email protected]

Note: places are given on a first-come first-served basis, but priority may be given to first-time students.

Open Workshops runs a free writing workshop every month, open to all CAMPUS members, ranging from practical exercises, technical masterclasses, to new and experimental approaches to making poetry. Email [email protected] for more information.

Adam Crothers was born in Belfast in 1984. He lives in Cambridge, where he completed a PhD in English at Girton College in 2010; he works as a library assistant, literary critic, and teacher, and as a Commissioning Editor for the online magazine The Literateur. A contributor to New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015), he is the author of Several Deer (Carcanet, 2016).