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This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

When you write about the big themes - love, sadness, fear, joy etc - how do you make sure you keep your imagery strong? Neil's lesson helps you avoid the obvious.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

John suggests the best ways to keep track of your drafts, ideas, observations and notes towards poems - never lose track of an idea again.

****For a limited period, John's download is available for free by following the link on our home page****

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

Everyone has times when the poems won't come. Tammy suggests some ideas to get round a block, and get the writing flowing again.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

Penny helps you to trick your brain into inventing new ideas and subjects for poetry. The perfect lesson if you're stuck for a subject.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

A guide to poetic collaborations: who is doing it well, and how you can collaborate in your own poetry work.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

Liz guides us through her own work with dialect and gives some tips as to how to explore other voices.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

'Who are you, yourself, alone and nameless?' J.R.R.Tolkien Toby guides us through the minefield of form.

A grounding in the basics for new writers, this course works through ten lessons exploring some of the traditions of poetry writing, an introduction to form and metre, and tips to develop intense, precise and significant poems.

Written by Nigel Forde.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

Here, Emily helps you turn your poems into letter poems, and talks about poems as an act of communication.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

John teaches you how to control the logic, tension, rhythm and form of your poems through manipulating your line breaks.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

For poets who want to recite their poems from memory when they perform, Inua provides some top tips to help you memorise your work, and how to keep your readings lively.

Poetry is revelation, but poets do not necessarily reveal themselves or tell us their life-stories in their poetry. Certainly since the earliest times, poets have felt the need to share with others a sense of the importance to themselves of their experience of life. How have they gone about doing this? By trying to find what Coleridge called the best words in the best order. Indeed, the purpose of poetry may be described as that sharing with others of what the poet has felt and then made. In this respect readers may find poetry meaningful precisely because the poet's original experience feels real in the reading of it, and the 'real' is contained in the 'reveal'.

But how true need poetry be in order to feel real to the reader? Isn't it already enough that what a poem reveals to us in some way resembles our own experience of the world or, though different, is nevertheless recognisable to us at the level of feeling and idea?

Poetry and Autobiography is divided into a series of lessons. Each lesson contains a set of ideas and questions as springboards for your own work, illustrated by published poems from around the world and throughout history. And since there is no correct time to write an autobiography (gone are the days when writers felt they should leave the task until their old age), a life-story recaptured, in instalments as disjointed as our lives are unintended, may reflect life in progress just as it can be seen as work-in-progress.

Written by Graham Fawcett.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

Chrissy looks at how you can take inspiration from comics to create visual, fun poems.

For beginners (but not absolute beginners!) and intermediate writers who want to explore some definitions of poetry; and to start some structured learning about rhyme, metre, verse forms, lineation and stanzas. Exercises, reading and writing tasks will help you begin to construct a voice, to create shapes on the page and develop your first drafts with confidence.

This is the download version of the face-to-face course Tamar runs regularly in London. You don't need to have taken the classroom course to find the download version useful - but if you have taken the classroom course, this version will function as a useful refresher or course handbook.

Written by Tamar Yoseloff.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

A B Jackson guides us through the short poem, where every word counts.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

When you're just getting going as a poet, it can be useful to model your work on existing poems. Alison shows you how to adapt and borrow other people's work to improve your own writing and develop your own style.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

What are the poetic equivalent of camera angles, zooming, editing and cinematic symbolism? Jane borrows film-makers techniques, adapts them for poetry and shows you how.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

The refrain is a poetic device that isn’t often seen these days – which means it is ripe for rejuvenation. Paul teaches you how to reclaim the refrain for use in contemporary poetry.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

Tamar Yoseloff guides you through the Tritina and offers suggestions as to how you can write your own.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

Advice about shaping and arranging the argument of your poem through the phases of a lyric poem.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

When does the title for your poem come - before, during or after you've written them? Tammy advises on how to create the most meaningful and arresting titles for you poems.

When does a bunch of poems become a collection? How does a poet achieve book publication? Perhaps you have thirty poems you are pleased with and you wonder if you are ready to submit your manuscript. The aim of this course is to give guidance and advice towards compiling a collection and getting it published. This could be your first full-length book, a pamphlet, or an application for an Eric Gregory Award.

Towards a Collection is divided into ten lessons. In each lesson we'll look at different aspects of the process, starting with extending your creative limits, getting a track record in magazines, compiling a pamphlet, structuring and ordering a full-length volume, the function of poem and book titles, and the rigorous editing required to prepare a manuscript for submission. We'll also consider covers, publicity, what happens when you do get accepted, and what readers and publishers might be looking for.

Written by Pascale Petit.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

John McCullough looks at how a writer's imagination can bring the past to life while still paying heed to the grain and structure of the past.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

How to make sure that the verbs you choose for your poems are doing the most powerful work they can.

This is a short download, containing a brief burst of advice about a specific area of craft or inspiration - perfect for breaking open new ideas.

Chris sets an exercise which sees you walking round a city (or town or village - wherever you are with other people about), recording your impressions and combining them in unusual ways to generate new poems.