Tutor Academy – April 2018

For this project we have collaborated with  Nathalie Teitler, director of The Complete Works, and co-curated a panel of up-and-coming poets who have never taught for the Poetry School before. We are very happy to be welcoming these 8 poets into the school with a series of half-day Saturday workshop throughout April, on topics of their choosing. As you might expect, there’s a diverse range of themes, voices and ideas here, so take a look at what’s on offer and make sure to sign up fast – places are very limited.

This series of April workshops is guaranteed to put the spring back in your step and offers you a golden opportunity to work with poetry’s stars of tomorrow, today!

Join this workshop with Yomi Sode to unlearn traditional approaches to writer’s block, and consider instead different methods of connecting with your subconscious and tapping into your senses for inspiration. Look at various example poems – including work from Janice N. Harrington, Brian Turner, Marie Howe and Kaveh Akbar – and explore practical ways to equip yourself with these skills. Learn to interpret what matters most in your mind, and how to mine this in-built wealth of inspiration!

Travel to ancient Greece with Cynthia Miller and learn what classical mythology can do for your poems, and what benefits a contemporary context can bring to these traditional tales. In this course you’ll read some contemporary poems that re-investigate old narratives – including work by Ocean Vuong, Sandeep Parmar, Danez Smith, Margaret Atwood and Tarfia Faizullah – and consider ways to apply these techniques to your writing. So join us for a mix of close reading, lively discussion and in-class exercises to rejuvenate your poetry with a mythical energy!

Explore how shifting the tense or mood of a verb can act as a gear change for a poem, opening up new and uncanny, unexpected and troubling new horizons with deft little adjustments. In this workshop you will read from work by Denise Riley, John Ashbery and Gwendolyn Brooks to investigate how these writers use verbs as the engines of their poems, before taking your own poems in for a service.

In this workshop you will explore the passionate, political voices of Latin America with Latino-British poet Leonardo Boix. Take a look at inspiring work from Jorge E. Eielson, Diana Bellesi and José Watanabe, to Martín Espada, Javier Zamora and Nathalie Diaz, investigating their varying works-in-progress, jazz-style improvisations and cultural translations, before considering how to apply these techniques to your own writing.

Join Elaine Baker to ask why animals remain a recurrent theme in modern poetry, before taking a fresh look at creatures in a broad selection of inspiring poems, including work by Norman MacCaig, Margaret Atwood, Selima Hill and Ruby Robinson. We will investigate what makes these poems successful and how they generate poetic ‘torque’ for the reader, before indulging our own animal fascinations and creating new creaturely poems of our own.

Delve into the possibilities and pleasures of refusal with Momtaza Mehri. Take inspiration from poets such as Akilah Oliver, kari edwards, Jayne Cortez and Aziza Barnes, who don’t yield to forms, genres and enforced subjectivities, and learn how to write your own refusing, fugitive poems; poems that do not speak truth to power but turn their backs on it instead. Learn to delight in the sanctity of illegibility and to write with your own unique, refusing voice.

Writing about death can be a difficult and traumatising experience; many poets struggle to write about this weighty subject at all, or feel restricted to a simple elegy. In this workshop we will take inspiration from pioneering poems on death – including work from Danez Smith, Hanif Abdurraqib, Denise Riley, Helen Dunmore, Ocean Vuong, Taylor Mali, Cynthia Dewi Oka and Aziza Barnes – and devise techniques and forms to breathe new life into the topic.

Explore how to transform your favourite performance work into equally successful page poems with Carmina Masoliver. This intensive workshop invites participants who regularly perform their work to consider their poetry on the page. We will look at poets who successfully occupy both spaces, and discuss what aspects to consider when translating your own work between these spaces, before creating new work that experiments with the page as a canvas for poetry that is both aurally and visually appealing.