Face to face

Mimi Khalvati’s Advanced Poetry Workshop is running a short summer term, Pascale’s course is an extension of it. Plenty of room for Mimi’s students and newcomers writing at an advanced level for an in-depth workshop of poems in progress, each session kicked off with reading published poetry to spark off new ideas, and keep their poetic discipline focussed over the summer months.

Mimi Khalvati’s Advanced Poetry Workshop is running a short summer term, Pascale’s course is an extension of it. Plenty of room for Mimi’s students and newcomers writing at an advanced level for an in-depth workshop of poems in progress, each session kicked off with reading published poetry to spark off new ideas, and keep their poetic discipline focussed over the summer months.

In-depth focus on your poems in progress and the overall direction and development of your work. There won’t be writing exercises, but the sessions will be enlivened by reading published poetry as a stimulus for your writing and discussion. To apply, please send four poems to Mimi at 130c Evering Road, London N16 7BD by 17 August 2012 (and specify if you would prefer the afternoon or evening session). The course takes place over three terms.

In-depth focus on your poems in progress and the overall direction and development of your work. There won’t be writing exercises, but the sessions will be enlivened by reading published poetry as a stimulus for your writing and discussion. To apply, please send four poems to Mimi at 130c Evering Road, London N16 7BD by 17 August 2012 (and specify if you would prefer the afternoon or evening session). The course takes place over three terms.

There are many links between the dance and poetry. This term we’ll take up with some of them - with metre, movement, rhythm, pace - and lead the line a merry dance. Will you, won't you, will you, won't you join the dance?

A course designed both for experienced writers looking to widen their repertoire and for relative beginners looking for a more structured approach to their writing, giving you the opportunity to define your goals as a writer while continuing to develop a body of poetry. Lots of exercises, reading, writing, group feedback and one-to-one or small group planning sessions to encourage you to construct an independent voice which is consistent from poem to poem, and to develop confidence in shaping your work.

What makes a poet’s work so distinctively theirs? How is it we can recognise an Emily Dickinson poem (for example), sometimes from yards away? Ransom writes that Emily Dickinson adopted ‘the poetic mask: the personality which was antithetical to her natural character and identical with her desire’. But is the voice of the poem a mask, or is the voice of the poem – the voice of desire – the only true voice? This course will seek to liberate and deepen our own poetry’s true voice. We will explore aspects of poetic voice, from the adopted voices of mythical figures and dramatis personae to the apparently personal voice of confessionalism; and above all we will seek to develop a trust in our own voice – that indelible, musical signature that emerges regardless, persistent as a thumbprint.

Please note that due to bank holidays/half term, two of the sessions will be held at the nearby Exeter Community Centre, 17 St David's Hill, Exeter, Devon EX4 3RG (01392 420549). Please also note that the second session will take place on a Tuesday rather than a Monday. Course dates and venues are listed below:

13th May                Exeter College

28th May (Tuesday) Exeter Community Centre

10th June       Exeter College

24th June          Exeter College

8th July       Exeter Community Centre

To be a contemporary poet, you should read contemporary poetry, but it’s easy to fall behind when so much is happening and so many new poets are publishing. This course is aimed at well-read advanced students who want to discuss and learn about recent developments in UK and US poetry. The first term will introduce you to a range of UK poets who have emerged in the past decade or so; second term will do the same with US poets; third term will look at a new generation of younger UK/US poets who are revitalising poetry. Class members will be encouraged to write and show
poetry which responds creatively to the poems discussed.

To apply for this course email six poems to programme@poetryschool.com by 24 August 2012

Further details: this is a course for well read, confident students who want to engage with the current poetic climate. Students can apply to join in any term of this three term course.

A workshop based on two tales by the Brothers Grimm. Both Hansel & Gretel and the lesser- known wonder tale The Juniper Tree deal with memory, nurture, abandonment and homecoming. Explore the historical, anthropological and social context of these tales to discover the themes, motifs and structures that will trigger your own new fairy tale poems.

We live in a built environment; from the familiar comforts of your own front room to the monumental scale of Buckingham Palace. Buildings can be holy sanctuaries or wholly confining - they frame our lives. Likewise a 'stanza' is a room, within the larger building of a poem. Join us for a literal and lateral exploration of built spaces - finding doors into new poetry, imagined institutions, and the real buildings that you inhabit or walk past every day. You’ll use plans and pictures of real and imagined buildings, and draw on your own favourite or best remembered buildings to create new work.

What can poets bring to the understanding of Film Noir, the Western, Horror, the Avant-Garde, Science Fiction, or the 'European Art Film'? And how can these genres inspire and inform your poetry? Join poet and film buff Simon Barraclough on a playful journey through the genres, unpicking classic scenes, mashing up cinema and literature and creating new work. Alien, Solaris, Don't Look Now, The Searchers, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Five Obstructions, L'Eclisse, the seminal work of Maya Deren: these are the kinds of films we will analyse and exploit for their poetic content. Where possible, the films will be matched with already published poems for discussion. Students will also be encouraged to explore the BFI's wonderful Mediatheque archive in search of inspiration. Essential tools: eyes, ears, imagination.

Poets have long drawn inspiration from painters and sculptors; with the rise of a new generation of artists challenging traditional media, can we find in them a source for poems which push boundaries in a similar manner? Robert and Tamar will take you into gallery spaces such as Gagosian and White Cube to engage with contemporary art and to encourage new poems in response. You will also look at parallels between the gallery as a space for exhibition and the page as a dynamic space for composition, and, based on the tutors' own experience, will discuss the technicalities of artist / poet collaborations, publications and residencies. The course takes place at the Poetry School and in gallery locations, on some Thursday evenings and some full Saturdays. Full details will be provided, but the basic outline is as follows ...

Thur 9 May: RVD & TY at the Poetry School
Sat 18 May: TY at a gallery
Thur 23 May: TY at the Poetry School
Sat 1 June: RVD at a gallery
Thur 6 June: RVD at the Poetry School
Thur 13 June: TY at the Poetry School
Thur 20 June: RVD at the Poetry School
Thur 27 June: RVD & TY at the Poetry School

How are doctors and hospitals represented? What about health, hygiene, sanitation and contamination? How best to work through contemporary issues, ethics and questions? You won’t be writing about your own personal medical experiences per se, but you will be writing about bodies and using your own as springboards for imaginative work. You’ll also read and discuss a range of poems by modern and contemporary poets who engage with the topic.

Instead of searching for the ‘big’ themes let’s return to the minutiae of our own lives, to William Carlos William’s ‘speaking language of things’. Let the bigger themes speak through the small things that inhabit our lives. We will read and write poems that move outwards from the specifics of our lives, such as Michael Laskey’s Doing My Mother’s Ironing, Refrigerator 1957 by Thomas Lux or Any Morning by Kate Ryan, letting the personal become political in the broadest sense.


Please note that there will be no class on 23rd May. The extra class will take place on 20th June.

This course is appropriate for beginners and those who have written some poetry but who would like to take a more structured approach to their writing. You will examine the basics of rhyme, metre, verse forms, lineation and stanza structure. Through exercises, reading, writing and feedback, you will also begin to construct a voice, to create shapes on the page and develop your first drafts with confidence.

Term One

Week One: Imitations
Presentations - 'Formal Wear: notes on rhyme, meter, stanza and pattern' – George Szirtes

Weeks Two - Four: Rhyme and Rhythm
Poems by Sylvia Plath, George Macbeth, Kay Ryan, Catherine Bowman, Theodore Roethke
Exercise: Rhyming trail poem
Exercise: Ballroom dance poem

Weeks Five - Seven: Sonnets
Introduction to 101 Sonnets – Don Paterson
Poems by Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, CK Williams, Billy Collins
Exercise: Sonnet

Weeks Eight - Ten: Villanelles, Sestinas
Poems by Derek Mahon, Elizabeth Bishop, Michael Donaghy, Dylan Thomas
Exercise: Villanelle / Sestina

Week Ten: Summary

Useful Reading

• The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, eds. (Norton, 2000)
• Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse Mary Oliver (Mariner Books, 1998)
• 101 Sonnets from Shakespeare to Heaney Don Paterson, ed (Faber, 1999)
• The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland, eds (Norton, 2008)

Term Two

Week One: Definitions of Poetry
Basil Bunting’s ‘Advice to Poets’
‘The Plain Sense of Things’ – Wallace Stevens
Exercise One: A Desolate Landscape

Week Two: Presentations

Week Three: Thoughts on Process
Essays by Eavan Boland, Mark Doty, Tamar Yoseloff
Exercise Two: The Immediacy of Condition

Week Four: Presentations

Weeks Five and Six: Lineation and Stanzaic Structure
Poems by Seamus Heaney, Sharon Olds, John Burnside, Jorie Graham
Exercise Three: Lineation experiments

Week Seven: Line versus Sentence
Poems by Raymond Carver and Alice Oswald
Exercise Four: Poem for Workshop Sessions

Weeks Eight, Nine and Ten: Workshopping

Week Ten: Summary
Exercise Five: Imitation

Useful Reading:

• Emergency Kit, Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney, eds. (Faber 2004)
• A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver (Harcourt Brace, 1994)
• Writing Poetry, W.N. Herbert (Routledge, 2010)

This course is suitable for beginners. The exact poems under discussion might change. It's best to start in the Autumn term, as the course is cumulative, but it's possible to join in Spring as long as students are not absolute beginners. No new students in the Summer term, as during this term, students work on their own writing portfolios.

Your poems are at the heart of these sessions: in-depth feedback from tutor and students on your poetry in progress. Bring 16 copies of one of your draft poems to the first session. Suitable for everyone looking to grow and develop as writers.

In Robert Hass' poem 'The Problem of Describing Colour', almost every stanza begins with 'If I said …', invoking speech to find a way to say something fresh about the colour 'red'. How do speech acts help us to define and refine perception? How can they be used as markers of the speaker and as a tool for self-reflexivity? How do experimental poets explode speech conventions to create new structures for poetry? Look for answers to these questions, and push your poems in some new directions.

In this seminar-style workshop Don will take the back off six poems by six different poets, in an attempt to figure out how they work - and how they have withstood the test of time. He’ll look at each poem from the perspective of its meaning and metre, its music, metaphors and metonymies, looking at how each of them - in their very different ways - have been built with the integrity of ‘single-celled organisms’. (Numbers for this session will be capped at 25)

Joelle Taylor, poet, playwright and Artistic Director
of SLAMbassadors UK, the national youth slam championships, leads a master class in spoken word. In the space of a few hours you will learn how to write for performance, find stimulus in the most unlikely places, create a new piece based on the theme of ‘identity’, explore performance techniques, discover how to work polyvocally and add rhythm and beatbox to a collaborative piece, and finally perform the finished poem.

Andre Breton said, ‘a man who cannot visualise a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot’ and random ephemera, juxtaposition and imagery form the beating heart of this 1-day workshop. We will use a series of short, focused writing prompts to encourage spontaneous poetic responses to a variety of stimuli. These responses will form the bases for writing and discussion during the session itself, and will also mean participants have a collection of raw material to take away with them. Bring a dedicated notebook and be ready to tackle group and individual exercises inspired by Surrealism, Dada and Oulipo. Visual and audio materials will sit next to excerpts and fragments, found texts, lists and random marginalia. There will be time to write privately, as well as a group-sharing session when participants will get the chance to read their own work and witness how fellow writers responded to the stimuli of the workshop.

‘You just go on your nerve’ (Frank O’Hara). A workshop can surprise us into going on our nerve, into writing about things we might not have thought of, or in ways that we haven’t written before. It can also surprise us into writing those poems that seem to have been waiting to be written. This workshop will include stimulating exercises in response to a variety of contemporary poems. Every level of writer welcome.

A group which focuses on detailed feedback and discussion of your poems in each session, also key topics. This year topics will include origins of poems, the surreal, and some major contemporary poets. To apply, email six poems as a word attachment to Myra myrarschneider@gmail.com or post with email address / SAE to the address above by 25 September 2012.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth (Oscar Wilde). Poems should surprise us as we write them. In this session on the dramatic monologue, you will enjoy the surprise and freedom that comes with wearing a mask. Through discussion and writing exercises, we will explore voice and character to uncover dark narratives: what is the postman really thinking? Why does Cathy spend so long in the shed?

Bring your poems-in-progress to this stimulating and serious class which aims to provide an opportunity not only to deepen your sense of your own work, but place it within the context of a living tradition. An hour’s close reading will be complimented by an hour’s themed discussion of
technical and ideological aspects of the art, with reference to a multitude of poets who have left their
invaluable mark on the field of poetry.

N.B The venue has changed since our programme went to print. Sessions will now take place at Hamilton House.

Using classic and contemporary poems which describe or are written from a particular place, we will travel in exciting writing exercises around the world. Please if you can bring a poem of your own about a place to share on the day. Also a postcard (or two) which means something to you, a holiday picture postcard - Skegness or Malibu Beach perhaps - or from your home town. At the heart of the Poetry Place day is enjoyable writing exercises which will move your writing on in more ways than one.

Using classic and contemporary poems which describe or are written from a particular place, we will travel in exciting writing exercises around the world. Please if you can bring a poem of your own about a place to share on the day. Also a postcard (or two) which means something to you, a holiday picture postcard -- Skegness or Malibu Beach perhaps -- or from your home town. At the heart of the Poetry Place day is enjoyable writing exercises which will move your writing on in more ways than one.

A close look at the act of translating poetry and the principles involved to discover how translation may also provide us with new starting-points for your own poetry. Working from French, Italian, German, Spanish and Swedish poems, you’ll explore key translation issues such as how to decide when literal word-for-word translation should end and idiomatic alternatives begin, and at what point rhyme, metaphor, pun, and syllable-count should or should not be thrown out of the translator’s window – i.e. how do you tell the baby from the bathwater? You don’t need to speak any of the languages involved as word by word support will be provided.

This fascinating, hands-on trawl of all the major pathways into new poems is as comprehensive as it is unique. Includes observation, the senses, personal memory, reflection, imagination, other people’s work – indeed, everything from the 'found poem' to Larkin's pickles. Mario’s immense experience in the field fuels a groundbreaking masterclass on compositional process, generating a workshop experience of immense variety and enduring value.

Travelling Workshops are package deals for your pre-existing groups of writers and readers. The Poetry School charges a set fee, how much you charge individual participants is up to you. Download our factsheet for more details.

This workshop addresses a writer’s need for adventure. Poets will be encouraged to consider their writing ‘beyond the poem’ in order to identify habits and possible new approaches. Through writing exercises and looking at the work of a range of contemporary poems we will explore sequence poems, life-drawing through language and challenging self-censorship. Part of the workshop will focus on clarifying your expectations/aspirations (ie publication/collections/residencies). Workshop content is flexible and can respond to the group’s interests and questions.

Travelling Workshops are package deals for your pre-existing groups of writers and readers. The Poetry School charges a set fee, how much you charge individual participants is up to you. Download our factsheet for more details.

This workshop will explore a range of start-up activities from which you will generate a number of drafts to take away for later development. Looking at a selection of published poems we will consider persona, pace and structure and finding ‘ways in’. Part of the workshop will focus on identifying what it is you need to progress – and how to make that happen. Hand-outs are provided on creating an editing check-list, and submitting work for competitions and publication. Workshop content is flexible and can respond the group’s interests and questions.

Travelling Workshops are package deals for your pre-existing groups of writers and readers. The Poetry School charges a set fee, how much you charge individual participants is up to you. Download our factsheet for more details.

How can ordinary experience be made extraordinary? In those gaps and cracks of the everyday, countless opportunities arise for creativity.   Mario concentrates on process, offering a unique workshop approach that leads to new work and fresh ways of thinking your way into a poem. "Inspiring... Feedback was the most positive we've ever had for an outside tutor" (A.C. Clarke). "Constant surprise... expanding sensory input - brilliant facilitator" (Making Poetry Workshops).

Travelling Workshops are package deals for your pre-existing groups of writers and readers. The Poetry School charges a set fee, how much you charge individual participants is up to you. Download our factsheet for more details.

Faking it up with the Truth - what the confessional poets can teach us about writing from life. (Clare can also run the following beginners' session - Sound Effects: fun with sound from nonsense poetry to Dada, onomatopeia to alliteration.)

Travelling Workshops are package deals for your pre-existing groups of writers and readers. The Poetry School charges a set fee, how much you charge individual participants is up to you. Download our factsheet for more details.

The line is the basic unit of poetic measure, and the way the poet crafts a line can be crucial to the reading of a particular poem. Through discussion and practical exercises, participants will explore strategies for creating pace, movement, shape and visual impact in their poems. Poems and texts by Denise Levertov, Sharon Olds and John Burnside will be examined.

Travelling Workshops are package deals for your pre-existing groups of writers and readers. The Poetry School charges a set fee, how much you charge individual participants is up to you. Download our factsheet for more details.

In this workshop on the contemporary in poetry, you'll look at developments in UK and US poetry in the last decade or so, focusing on the writers who have brought new vigour and intriguing ideas and styles to the world of poetry. By leading a discussion of the work of UK poets such as Jen Hadfield and Nick Laird and US poets including D A Powell and Chelsey Minnis, editor and anthologist Roddy Lumsden will open up new possibilities in your own writing, and expand your poetic horizons.

Travelling Workshops are package deals for your pre-existing groups of writers and readers. The Poetry School charges a set fee, how much you charge individual participants is up to you. Download our factsheet for more details.

This one-day course will help you to prepare poems which are more likely to find success in competitions or be published in magazines. Roddy Lumsden, an experienced editor of poetry and competition judge, will take you through the mistakes writers make, and will give you tips on editing and redrafting your poems to make them more effective. We will talk about poetry competitions and journals and look at poems which have won competitions in recent years and poems by less established poets which have appeared in leading poetry magazines.

Travelling Workshops are package deals for your pre-existing groups of writers and readers. The Poetry School charges a set fee, how much you charge individual participants is up to you. Download our factsheet for more details.