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.

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Online: 'No Surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader'

09 Jan 2012, Open to all, Interactive Online Course, Andrew Philip.

Whether you’re just setting out on your journey into poetry or have already been on the road a while, Robert Frost’s statement rings true. Taking this idea as our jumping-off point, we’ll pull apart some of the ways that poets create surprise – such as line breaks, word choice, structure and tone – then use the writing exercises try to put them back together in our own ways. Meanwhile, we’ll play with a few tricks to help get your writing brain into the mood to surprise you.

Please note: You need to register at least two weeks before the start date in order to complete the first online course task.

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Online: Prose Poetry & Flash Fiction

10 Jan 2012, Open to all, Interactive Online Course, Carrie Etter.

Interested in trying your hand at prose poetry or flash fiction and not sure where to begin? This online course will introduce you to both forms, with well-honed writing exercises, lively discussion about sample works, and advice about publishing.

Please note: You need to register at least two weeks before the start date in order to complete the first online course task.

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Online: The Devil is in the Detail - description in poetry

12 Jan 2012, Open to all, Interactive Online Course, Jacob Sam-La Rose.

'The need to translate experience into something resembling adequate language is the writer’s blessing or the writer’s disease, depending on your point of view.’ - Mark Doty. In this course, you’ll launch off from a grounding in the nuts and bolts of descriptive language to explore ways of detailing the worlds and experiences you attend to in your work through vivid and startling detail, with the challenge of balancing precision, musicality, accuracy and invention.

Please note: You need to register at least two weeks before the start date in order to complete the first online course task.

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Online: The Sonnet Studio

22 Mar 2012, Open to all, Interactive Online Course, Kate Light.

There’s just something about a sonnet! This compact form has captured the hearts and pens of poets for centuries. “I will put Chaos in fourteen lines/and keep him there,” wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay. A huge range of poets, from Shakespeare to Milllay to ee cummings, Marilyn Nelson, and Molly Peacock, have done their best work in the “little song”—drawn to its musicality and emotion, compression and transparency, and to its capacity to be at once timeless and contemporary, personal and universal. For love, inspiration, humor, and even technical experimentation, sonnets are ideal vessels.

Join us to delve deeply into sonnets’ techniques and magic, reading and writing under the guidance of one of our keenest contemporary practitioners, poet Kate Light. Whether you are a newcomer or well-seasoned sonneteer, you will deepen and expand your sense of what this powerful form has been and can be!

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Online: Writing the Difficult Stuff - The Confessional

11 Jan 2012, Open to all, Interactive Online Course, Martin Figura.

Confessional poetry has many pitfalls and is often viewed with caution, or even hostility. Yet poetry is what people turn to in difficulty; the success of the Bloodaxe anthologies is one of the testimonies to this. Producing poems about complex feelings can bring an understanding to the writer. The course will explore approaches that enable the writer to explore difficult memories and go beyond the facts into the imagination, where metaphorical truth comes into play. It will look at critical distance and how understatement can produce challenging poems that engage and move the reader.

Please note: You need to register at least two weeks before the start date in order to complete the first online course task.