Groups

According to Jean Cocteau, ‘The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.’ This course considers the various ways in which poems manipulate the truth in order to tell it. Drawing on a range of contemporary examples, we’ll look closely at how poets use invention, suggestion, embellishment and surprise to get the effects they’re after, and you’ll be investigating some of these tactics in your own writing. We’ll also consider what poems conceal and the power of silence – what happens in the crucial white space, and how does the poem’s relationship with form affect the way we read it? There’ll be regular writing exercises and you’ll be encouraged to think about your own decisions, particularly when reworking and editing your poems.

The Poetry School’s contribution to the UK-wide cultural commemorations will be a screening of the Battle of the Somme film followed by a performance of new poems that it inspires. The new work will be performed alongside a public screening of the film at Lambeth’s Cinema Museum in early February 2017.

What are stanzas for? Alongside the poetic line itself, the stanza is one of two main structural features of modern poetry. Nevertheless, many poets feel unsure about how to use them in their own work.

In this course, you will explore the possibilities of established stanza forms, such as terza rima and Tennyson’s In Memoriam stanza, as well as turning your attention to the use of the stanza in free verse, and in contemporary experimental work. In all of these examples, you will learn to see the use of stanzas as a way of clarifying the development of the ideas and images in your poems, as well as improving the dynamic movement of your work.

There will be opportunities for you to discuss and revise poems you have already written in terms of their use of stanzas, as well prompts to create new work in response to the stanza forms employed by other poets. Although there is no right way to use stanzas, this course will help you to sharpen your poetic craft and find solutions that work for your own poems.

The late mediaeval/early modern English translations of the Bible are among the fundamental texts — alongside Beowulf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare — of English literature, comprising an unrivalled treasure-house of content, themes, forms and techniques that contemporary poets might appropriate and incorporate into their work. On this course, you will identify characteristic Biblical literary techniques such as parallelism, repetition, rhetorical questions, precise lexis, compression and economy, patterns of imagery, distinctive approaches to conjunctions/prepositions and much more, writing your own poems under their influence, as well as considering the distinctive content of the various texts and the parallels between the verse structures of the original Biblical languages and Old English prosody. Key texts, pre-sessional reading and other necessary contextual material will be made available before the course starts. (This is a repeat of a course that has run previously)

A closed group for those taking part in the 2015/16 New North Poets collaboration between New Writing North and the Poetry School.

You can advertise on CAMPUS for free in ‘The Plug Chain’, following one golden rule – if you want to plug your latest self-published book or one man show, you must also recommend something by someone else. Thus – the plug ‘chain’. Recommendations must be genuine and impartial (within reason) or will be subject to immediate moderation.

A private group for those of us who want to keep in touch after Rebecca Goss’s wonderful House & Universe course.

What’s your favourite wild animal? We’ve all read poems that feature a sea bird, a house cat, a dog, a fox or a bee. Animals that share our home or our back garden.

But what of those more unusual, less-popular creatures? The aardvark, the clown fish, the wombat, the penguin? The snow macaque? The lavender albino python? Surely they deserve some attention too?

On this new Open Workshop with Francine Elena, by examining a few of the rarer animals in poetry, you will have the chance to explore wilder, weirder (or perhaps just cuter) terrain in your writing, bringing to life new creature poems in the tradition of D H Lawrence’s mosquito, Elizabeth Bishop’s armadillo or even Vasko Popa’s ‘starry snail’.

Understanding visual poetry gives all poets an understanding of the essential but often hidden details of how poems work. This online reading course invites you to immerse yourself in the world of 21st century visual poetry with the editors of The New Concrete (Hayward Publishing) a major new anthology of this genre. Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe have worked with over 100 artists over a two year period and will instigate discussion around the new approaches, ideas and techniques being used in visual poetry. You will get the chance to explore new work being created at the intersection of visual art and literature and see how digital text, image manipulation, modern printing and the Internet has re-energised an approach poetry inspired by the original concrete poetry movement. You will further understand how the phoneme can be used for syntactic play and for sound effect, how the poem can catch the eye before it is read, how white space is the basis for the essence of a poem and can be seen as part of its cohesive whole, and how all poems in their spacing, breathing spaces, line breaks and stanza shapes are in fact ‘visual’ and can be expressed in multiple ways.

Please make sure you have paid for this course before requesting group membership. For more information: http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/online/the-new-concrete–visual-poetry-in-the-21st-century–online-reading-group.php

This is a student-centred course designed both for experienced writers looking to widen their repertoire and for beginners looking for a more structured approach to their writing. You will have the opportunity to practise approaches to writing and start to build up a body of creative work with a definite individual identity. You will consider different ways in which writing can engage with public or private themes and examine the different effects of free and formal verse structures and of working within artificial constraints. Through reading and discussion, writing exercises, group feedback and small group planning sessions, you will be encouraged to construct an independent voice, which is consistent from poem to poem.

30 poets, 27 gardens, 1 Open Garden Squares Weekend. A group for our latest bouquet of garden poets.

As babies, the human face is the first thing that we learn to see and to interpret. The idea that we can capture a ‘likeness’ of a person, revealing key truths or fundamental aspects of their character in a single composition has always dominated world art, ever since early man scratched his own likeness. In this course we’ll be examining some of the techniques of portraiture and exploring how they can be applied to poetic composition, creating some of our own poetry silhouettes, caricatures and maybe even a selfie. We’ll also be considering the ethical questions that arise when we attempt to represent another person. What does it mean to have a sitter? What do the other objects and costumes in a portrait tell us about the subject? How do we negotiate the various gazes at work between the artist, the subject and the audience? Come and lock eyes with us, and maybe create some poems that will follow you around a room.

What are the contours of Romanticism beyond the ‘big six’ poets? There is no doubting the achievements of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake, or Byron, Shelley and Keats: but their poetry sprang from a culture as infinitely rich and various as their verse itself, marked by social ferment and the radical ideas of revolutionaries in Europe and the Americas. On this reading course, poet and academic Dan Eltringham leads you down some of the green lanes and byways of British Romanticism, from its roots in 18th century loco-descriptive, agrarian, pastoral and georgic poetry, through its lesser-known poets, thinkers and artists. Setting the familiar Romantic poets in their broader social and artistic contexts, we will encounter on the road the rural cadences of William Cowper and the botanical precision of Charlotte Smith (both great influences on Wordsworth), the neglected Lake Poet Robert Southey, the mysterious Scottish Bard ‘Ossian’, John Clare’s anti-enclosure poetry, and the work of marginalized female poets such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Dorothy Wordsworth. The course also glances ahead to the legacy of Romanticism in British and American poetry and aesthetics, and will consider Romantic visual art from Constable and Turner onwards.

Have you been writing prose poetry and want to strengthen your practice, your poems? Advanced Prose Poetry aims to help practitioners raise their game by looking closely at sentence structure, length and rhythms, and exploring different approaches to the prose poem: the use of a controlling metaphor, narrative, and the surreal, among others. We will also consider full-length collections of prose poetry (a reading list will be sent in advance). Chat sessions will sometimes focus on new writing, sometimes on new ideas, and always involve stimulating discussion. Applicants must submit two prose poems in advance to show their ability in the form. Poems will be judged anonymously.

Doesn’t inspiration feel good? The rush of language, the flash of illumination, the racing to the notebook or computer or phone to write it down as if taking dictation from a god or muse? It happens, like lightning, but poets can’t count on it, even if they persistently wait in the rain. We have no way of knowing how our best work is going to practices that might get us there. Each week, we’ll explore poems that seem driven by various modes, experiences, and procedures, such as poems driven by narrative, by sound, by form; poems that have something urgent to communicate; poems that happen mathematically (through addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division); and poems that come about by jazzing around with language. Then we’ll try out all of these approaches and make them our own. Poets represented in the readings will include Gertrude Stein, Harryette Mullen, John Ashbery, Joe Brainard, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Jane Yeh. This workshop is designed for students at all levels of experience.

Is writing about your child always boring or saccharine? Or can poems about parenthood say important things about love, life and death? Was Cyril Connolly right to claim that ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,’ or can children actually be a rich source of inspiration? Each session, you will look at parenthood from a different angle – through pregnancy, identity, language and letting go. We’ll discuss lullabies and Lorca; Sharon Olds’ ‘Brag’ about childbirth and Coleridge’s sleepless nights; Edward Lear’s ‘Dong with a luminous nose’ and the politics of parenting. There will be lots to read and a writing exercise each week to (hopefully) prove Connolly wrong. (This is a repeat of a course that has run previously).

In The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction, American poet Dean Young urges us to play apart from obsessions with ‘craft’ when we write. He exclaims ‘We are making birds not birdcages’. Let’s take that as our rallying cry. The lifeblood of these sessions will be encounters with innovative contemporary poems, cycles of generative ‘obstructions,’ and conversations about what you create. Expect that ours will be an unconventional, provocative space devoted to experimentation and the invention of new forms.

This is a Campus group associated with Tamar Yoseloff’s Routes into Poetry course, a place for course members to share work, resources and conversation.

Course description: 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. (If you are
a complete beginner, we recommend you download our course How to Write Poetry.)

In a letter, Robert Lowell once told Elizabeth Bishop that ‘Irony is being amusing about what we can’t understand.’ Lowell’s description might chime with many poetry fans who find contemporary poetry quirky but hard to grasp. This course will explore the increasingly fraught relationship with sincerity and self-expression that poetry has developed over the last 60 years, from Frank O’Hara and Paul Muldoon to millennial poetry on either side of the Atlantic and work showcased in the anthology ‘Dear World and Everyone in It’. Readings and related writing exercises will help you to appreciate writing that questions itself and pushes back against tired convention, both in poetry and the wider language. It will be a perfect fit for anyone looking to bring some contemporary edge to work that might currently feel too safe and traditional to grab an editor’s attention. (This is a repeat of a course that has run previously.)

Spoken word and film poems are on the rise, celebrated artists are working with voice, script and sound in innovative ways, and Radio 4 – the most famous talk radio station in the world – now even has an official Poet in Residence. But what are the skills needed to make poems or poetic drama for sound alone (either live radio or recording), when the performer is not entirely present? In this course, we are each others’ audience. You will make recordings with and for each other, memorise our poems as actors do, and learn to convey images and sounds that are dramatic to the ear, formalising what we’ve done into scripts. Inspired by work from sound installations by Lavinia Greenlaw for Artangel to Dylan Thomas’s original radio verse play Under Milk Wood, from spoken word shows on the radio to the inclusion of a spoken word segment in the magazine show Saturday Live, we will write new radio-ready poems and mini verse dramas sensitive to changes of pitch and tempo, mutter and oration, utilising stage directions, sound effects, and recaps for listeners tuning in late – all while never straying too far from voice and the play of voices, and always being respectful to the raw conditions of sound.