Online

You are here: Home > Courses & Workshops > Online

Our interactive online courses take place in Moodle – a custom built virtual learning environment on the web. Tutors set exercises or writing assignments, which you post to Moodle in advance of a fortnightly live-typed discussion.

During the live discussion students and the tutor can respond to each others’ work in a free-flowing conversation. All comments are archived for you to review at a later date. There is also a forum where students are free to continue to debate and discuss throughout the course.

Online courses are a great way to connect with other poets around the world, and you don't even have to leave the house. All you need is an internet connection and a computer.

A more detailed guide on how to participate will be provided when you enrol, but please note that online courses are recommended for those who are already comfortable in an online environment as we will only be able to offer limited technical support to students.

You will need to have easy access to the internet via a broadband connection. 

8 courses found
D
» More
Online: Dramatic Poetry: on poetry and plays
20 May 2013, Open to all, Interactive Online Course, Inua Ellams.
Using Inua’s experience as a poet and a theatre-writer, you will read examples of poetic and theatrical texts, explore and sketch out your own long narratives, and write individual poems that are episodes within the narrative. Something unexpected must happen to a protagonist at rest for a story to begin. It can be entirely internal; the incident can be tiny, imperceptible, magnificently insignificant to anyone but the protagonist – but because we are working with poetry, we can spend a lot of time can be building ominous reasons ensuing chaos. Poetry affords us many other freedoms when writing for theatre.
F
» More
Online: Finding the Start Line
28 May 2013, Open to all, Interactive Online Course, Sarah Hymas.
We all have to begin somewhere, and sharing that beginning can be inspiring, fun and a lot less intimidating than going it alone. This course will explore how in writing poetry we need to read poetry, talk poetry, exercise and share our own poetry. Through writing practice and live chat, we’ll look at the basics of poetry: the processes of writing down ideas, finding the best language, creating line and stanza units, and using form. Each assignment will present published poems for inspiration. There will be opportunity to feedback on assignments and to discuss issues raised by them in the live chat sessions. The emphasis is on learning through play and facing the unknown.
O
» More
Online: Online Forum Course with Fawzia Kane
06 May 2013, Open to all, Interactive Online Course, Fawzia Kane.
Do you have a heap of discarded poems sitting on your sideboard or desktop which just won’t work no matter how many revisions you make? The Poetry School’s new online poetry workshops provide a place for the general improvement of your left-for-dead poems, your work in need of refreshment, and your brand new pieces. Bring poems of any shape or size to this workshop for detailed written feedback once a fortnight from a tutor, and general forum feedback from fellow students. This group will be especially good for those working towards a manuscript, or those with a large batch of poems that they are looking to ready for magazine or competition submission.
» More
Online: Online Forum Course with Tamar Yoseloff
06 May 2013, Open to all, Interactive Online Course, Tamar Yoseloff.
Do you have a heap of discarded poems sitting on your sideboard or desktop which just won’t work no matter how many revisions you make? The Poetry School’s new online poetry workshops provide a place for the general improvement of your left-for-dead poems, your work in need of refreshment, and your brand new pieces. Bring poems of any shape or size to this workshop for detailed written feedback once a fortnight from a tutor, and general forum feedback from fellow students. This group will be especially good for those working towards a manuscript, or those with a large batch of poems that they are looking to ready for magazine or competition submission.
P
» More
Online: Plain Poems
21 May 2013, Open to all, Interactive Online Course, Andrew McMillan.
Our supper is plain but we are very wonderful (Patchen). What does it mean to create a ‘plain poem’? Can poetry be plain and still be wonderful? How do we strip a poem back to its barest, most striking bones and still give it the weight it needs to be anchored on a page and in a readers mind? In this course, we will examine the idea of unpoetic poetry, consider different techniques for achieving an arresting sparseness and, through the study of both prose excerpts and contemporary poems, consider how the practise of the plain, clean line might write itself into our own work.
T
» More
Online: The Art of Healing
23 May 2013, Open to all, Interactive Online Course, Warsan Shire.
Trauma has always been a catalyst for the creation of poetry, whether it be the pain of loss, the sadness of love, or the horrors of war, poets have used memory as a landscape to journey through difficult experiences. In what ways can people heal through poetry? How do different poets explore trauma in their work? How can you write about personal subjects and still remain safe? This course will help you navigate through your own personal experiences using structured free writing and writing prompts. We will use the work of poets who are famous for their vulnerable but brave style; Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath and Suheir Hammad. Through the writing exercises you will learn how to write from a place of honesty and vulnerability, to give a voice to a quiet place, to heal what you have buried away.
» More
Online: The Next Step
27 May 2013, Open to all, Interactive Online Course, Niall O'Sullivan.
This course is for poets that have moved from beginner to intermediate stages and offers technical advice and exercises on the finer aspects of writing poems - examining form, argument, voice, metaphor and more. You will also be guided through different ways of sharing you poetry with the world such as readings, networking, submitting to magazines and using the internet as a way to publicise and share your work. You will workshop your poems, receiving friendly feedback and constructive criticism within a comfortable and supportive online setting.
W
» More
Online: Writing Blind
22 May 2013, Advanced, Interactive Online Course, Sarah Jackson.
‘I do not want to see what is shown. I want to see what is secret. What is hidden amongst the visible. I want to see the skin of the light.’ (Hélène Cixous, Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey). Some of the best poems are written blind. We don’t know where we’ll end up when we start writing them and so they take us, as well as the reader, by surprise. During this course we’ll explore poems that surprise us, reading and discussing work by a range of contemporary North American poets including
Louise Glück, Li-Young Lee and Gary Young. We’ll think about ‘what is hidden amongst the visible’ in our own poetry, and undertake a series of exercises designed to help us write blind, without deciding our destination in advance, without always knowing where we are going.