Groups

Used in its modern context, confinement refers to a state of being limited or constricted. It’s rarer, and older definition however relates to ‘the condition of being in childbirth”. This clash of meanings will be the source of this workshop as we explore ways in which the restrictive elements of our lived experiences, our identities and our histories, can also give birth to new forms of creativity and expression.

On this Open Workshop (they’re back!) we’ll look at contemporary poetry from writers like Yesenia Montilla, Ocean Vuong and Danez Smith that grapples with the overlapping worlds of literal and conceptual confinement, where the landscapes of queer identities, migrant identities and more collide to provide new ways to discuss selfhood. This workshop is for anyone that wants to use poetry to explore the freedoms hidden in the identities they feel confined by.

An intensive studio course on bad language, bad form and bad taste.

Write on Lynchian themes, including dreams, identity, sexuality and the supernatural world of love.

Explore the boundaries of writing from, about and naming desire

Use philosophical concepts to sharpen your poetry, and poetry to bring those concepts to life

An advanced online course investigating and mastering the elegy

Develop your own language of survival & explore how to write in a way which nourishes and gives shape to chaos

How can poetry speak to us if it does not take risks, say something bold and new, make adventurous leaps with language and form?

This is the closed group for students enrolled on the Poetry School’s MA in Writing Poetry in partnership with Newcastle University, 2016/18, and studying in London.

Embrace multiple languages in your poetry and challenge the boundaries between domestic and foreign.

Peer into the world of science and scientists to gather inspiration for new poems

Equip yourself to adjust the nuts and bolts that account for the sound of a line

Avoid plagiarism, but explore the creative activity of appropriation and “stealing”

Translate the felt world into poetry and write work of the body

How can poetry respond to ecological disaster and its far-reaching repercussions?

Writer and filmmaker Ross Sutherland will create thirty new works over March and April 2015. Each work will be a synthesis of poetry and video, exploring the different ways that the two mediums can shape and influence the other. Ross is travelling across the UK throughout this period, completing a national tour of his theatre show, Standby For Tape Backup. Hence, the project also doubles as a poetic tour diary. Ross will use the project to respond to the places he visits and the people he meets.

In this public group, CAMPUS students can also provide Ross with materials to respond to, as well as create their own work in response. Ross will be casting his magpie eyes over CAMPUS looking for raw materials that he can fashion into one of the 30 film-poems he’ll be making as part of his digital residency.

In particular, Ross wants to find out what inspires us as individuals – our personal muses and private obsessions. Ross is asking CAMPUS for prompts, provocations and creative suggestions to help stimulate new ideas for films, and to push him in new and unlikely directions.

The rules. You may consider sharing:

– Photos (personal, or public domain/archive)
– Video (personal, or public domain/archive)
– Songs/audio clips of music and field recordings
– Favourite poems by other people
– Found text (page of a website, or a photo of text)
– Overheard conversations
– Interesting articles and links

You can also ask Ross questions and suggest personal challenges or restrictions (no ice buckets please!)

CAMPUS members can also share a poem of their own with Ross, but this should be done with discretion. Furthermore, Ross reserves the right not to use any of the material he is sent.

If you’d like to share something with Ross, please upload it – at any time – to the 30 Poems / 30 Videos group on CAMPUS (you’ll need to join the group to do this). Ross will be checking the group regularly.

Any member of CAMPUS caught violating Community Guidelines, or using this group to conspicuously advertise projects of their own will be removed.

This five-session course is open to anyone who wishes to participate in playing and experimenting with poetic forms, styles, and genres. Taking a range of starting points, we will open up ideas of what poetry is, with a view to stimulating your writing and sharing in discussion. We will read poems by several writers whose writing has brought fresh impetus to poetry. Each participant will engage with a palette that may enrich or clarify their own poetry.

Please make sure you have paid for this course before requesting group membership.

How might we eschew a life built upon lies, secrets and silence? And how might a “queer” poetics free us of our emotional chains?

What do long poems bring out of the poet’s voice that shorter verse cannot? A lot of workshops are all about editing work down to size and keeping things concise; on this online course we will be pushing poetry to its limits and generating work over 40 lines, the cut-off point for many magazines and competitions. Over 5 months we will explore specific poems – such as Toby Martinez De Las Rivas’s ‘Twenty-One Prayers for Weak or Fabulous Things’, Lucie Brock-Broido’s ‘Domestic Mysticism’, Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’, Kate Tempest’s ‘Brand New Ancients’ – and consider why these poems work as longer poems, their tempo, tone and use of repetition, exaggeration and stylisation, and also how on a larger scale poems can work without being over-written. We’ll then work ways in and out of our own long poems, learning how to keep up the stamina it takes to keep our lines limber and flowing, and how narrative structure, lists, meditations on reflective ideas, incantations, and invoking the mystical and metaphysical can yield grand results.

‘A poem is like a much, much richer joke’ – Adam Zagajewski. On this course, you’ll look at some seriously funny poems by the likes of Glyn Maxwell, Simon Armitage, Thomas Lux, Jo Shapcott and Carol Ann Duffy, exploring a range of approaches to the comic, considering aspects such as narrative, allegory and the use of the surreal. You’ll look at a range of forms, such as the sonnet and the villanelle, and how they can be used to shift a comic poem into seriousness; and how the use of everyday life and characters can result in strange and original comic impacts. Looking at ‘crossover’ writers such as Benjamin Zephaniah and John Cooper Clarke, this course will also seek to bridge the relationship between ‘page’ and ‘performance’ poetry, seeking similarities rather than differences in how both employ comic techniques. Lastly, you will look at what in literary terms is often seen as ‘bad’ comic poetry, while seeking to develop our own comic poems which, while they will hopefully make people smile or laugh, will go far beyond the confines of what is traditionally considered as light verse.

To book your place on this course, please go to: http://tinyurl.com/comicpoetry