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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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

This workshop looks at narrative in contemporary poetry. Many poems are dismissed as 'mere anecdote' and story poems have somewhat fallen out of fashion. Yet some poets manage to make the genre work and others have reinvented it, with 'elliptical', 'associative', condensed or non-linear narrative. We will look at a range of contemporary UK and US poems which tell stories using a variety of techniques. The last section of the workshop will involve me making comments on poems (to be submitted in advance) by the workshop participants, with advice on how to improve them editorially and in terms of their narrative strengths.

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.

Write what you don't know - looking at poetry and surprise, with techniques to keep your poetry fresh from surrealist games to fake travelogues and literary transvestism.(Clare can also offer the following intermediate session - Acting up: Creating dramatic voices in monologues and dialogues)

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 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.

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.