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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘... the collision of two ‘languages’, which is what I think any voice in creative writing, essentially, must be. There’s the voice of the ‘person’ who’s apparently speaking, then there’s the voice of the writer...’ (Amanda Dalton). How do we tackle voice in poetry? Can the use of character free us from the constraints of overtly personal writing? Who’s really speaking here anyway? This course will explore such questions and attempt to discover how to develop a voice that rings true regardless of its authenticity.

Please note that there will be no class on 11th July. There will be an extra class at the end of term on 18th July.

If you know the basics of your craft and are ready to send your poems out into the world, this course is for you. It will concentrate on the relationship between form and content. Where do we find poetry? Is any topic out of bounds? How do we create the poetic ‘I’ and ‘you’? What can we learn from types of poem, such as the cut-up, ballad or pastoral, where form and content are closely linked? This is a feedback class, there will be some focus on students’ poems in progress every week.

Term 1

1. Introduction
2. What Can a Poem be About? – Plath’s Toothbrush and Content
3. Finding Poetry: Centos, Cut-ups, Blackouts
4. Poet as Connection-Maker – Imagery and Aesthetic
5. The Shape of a Poem: Calligrams and Syllabics
6. Prose Poems and Storytelling
7. Letters of the Alphabet: Abercedarians, Alliterative Verse and Acrostics
8. Metre and the ‘Sound of Sense’
9. The Question of Rhyme
10. Redrafting

Term 2

1. Beginnings and Titles
2. The Poetic ‘I’ – Voice and Idiolect
3. The Ode and the Poetic ‘You’
4. Monologues and Dialogues
5. Confessionalism – Fictionalising the Self
6. The Elegy and Loss
7. The Ghazal and Longing
8. The Lullaby and Birth
9. Poetry and the Supernatural: Prayers, Spells and Hauntings
10. Performing

Term 3

1. Poetry and Place
2. Nature poetry and The Pastoral
3. The ‘Lunch Poem’ and the City
4. Ballads and Folktale
5. Ottava Rima and the Epic
6. Satire, Politics and Englishness
7. Exotic forms: the pantoum, tanka and tanaga
8. Experiments I: Oulipo
9. Experiments II: Sevenlings, Specular poems and beyond…
10. Publishing – Assembling a manuscript

This is a course for intermediate writers, suitable for those who have done Tamar Yoseloff's Routes into Poetry course or similar. Term one looks at the building blocks of poetry and how they relate to content. Term two focuses more on voice. Term three widens out to look at politics and place. Lots of feedback on poems in progress. Students can start at the beginning of each term.

NB - the third term of this course will be taught by Jacqueline Saphra

Please note that there will be no class on 29th May. There will be an extra class at the end of term on 17th July.