You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Courses’ category.
I’ve just finished another online course hosted by the Poetry School – Accidental Love Poems with David Tait.
Founded in 1997 by poets Jane Duran, Mimi Khalvati and Pascale Petit, the Poetry School is a plethora of all things poetry and the UK’s largest provider of poetry education. It offers a variety of courses of differing lengths and levels, with a new program published each term. I opt for the international courses using its online platform CAMPUS, as there’s no live chat allowing me to write and feed back on work at a time to suit before each deadline.
David is a British-born poet working as a teacher in China and I’ve completed a previous course by him that focused on cities. The prompts have been wonderful and inspired some incredible work, and I’m rather happy with my own batch of poems produced. Before this I did Writing Emotion with Rebecca Tamás and next term I’ve signed up for Elena Karina Byrne‘s Ekphrasis, Art and Translation.
What I love about these courses is discovering new poets, not just through fellow students, but through the assignments and reading set, plus feedback is invaluable, both honing your skills providing it and applying it to your work. And of course they drive you to write! So if you haven’t already, check out the Poetry School, if only to explore the variety of resources and information available.
April’s already here and I haven’t blogged or published, but I have been writing. One of my monthly poetry groups has resurrected itself, albeit online, and I’m near completion of another Poetry School course called Writing Emotion: Contemporary Confessional Poetry.
Facilitated by Rebecca Tamás, author of the poetry collection WITCH, a blend of feminist exploration and occult expression published by Penned in the Margins, this course invites us to give breath and bone to some difficult stuff, to give it a voice. Over five fortnightly assignments and reading the likes of Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire, we are challenged to tackle experiences and feelings through the safety of prompts, such as masks, spells and play. The emphasis, however, is on an outward view; to share intimacies the reader can connect with and relate to, so they experience our emotion as their own.
It’s not surprising that with recent events, the poems I’ve produced reference the invasion of Ukraine and climate change (both wars involving humankind and no winners), one of which was my first specular, a challenge in itself, but a satisfying one. I have been surprised though with where the prompts have taken me, for example, what starts off as a poem about the man in the moon morphs into something else entirely, weaving in elements from my past I thought I’d tidied, which is the power of confessional poetry I guess, catharsis at its best.
To satisfy the forever-hungry poet in me, I enrolled in two courses and am halfway through the first, Hearing Voices, through the Poetry School.
Image courtesy of the Poetry School
Run online via CAMPUS, the school’s social platform, five assignments are set over 10 weeks with no live chats, which makes it ideal for us international students. The tutor is Kathryn Simmonds, a British poet and short story writer with her most recent collection, The Visitations, published by Seren.
Inspiration for the course came from Tony Hoagland’s The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice and Kathryn shared this quote from the American poet in the first assignment:
One of the most difficult to define elements in poetry is voice, the distinctive linguistic presentation of an individual speaker…When we hear a distinctive voice in a poem, our full attention is aroused and engaged, because we suspect that here, now, at last, we may learn how someone else does it – that is, how they live, breathe, think, feel, and talk.
The prompts have produced some amazing work and I love being introduced to new poets. The first assignment focused on our voices, the second those of family and the third, voice and vulnerability. So far my poems explore my recent cancer experience and no doubt will form part of the collection I’m developing. I’ll share details of the second course shortly but in the meantime, never stop learning I say.
I’ve just finished an online workshop facilitated by Andy Jackson called ‘Poetry Season’, which ran over six weeks, each with a different theme.
Andy’s based in Victoria, an amazing poet with five collections to his name, the most recent being Music Our Bodies Can’t Hold. I’ve met Andy a few times now, such a warm and engaging person, so when he sought interest in a new poetry workshop he’d developed, I jumped at the chance.
The weekly assignment comprised a short essay, example poems and prompts for us to respond to by drafting a poem of our own and sharing it with the other participants. Andy ran two groups in parallel due to the volume of interest received, with another scheduled later in the year, already with a waiting list I believe.
Themes covered included ‘Summer’ (incredibly apt considering the recent heatwaves!), ‘Place’ and ‘Others’, all inviting us to explore form and technique, to step into unfamiliar territory, to not hold back. Andy provided detailed feedback each week with participants encouraged, but not required, to share their thoughts on each piece. The group I was in was incredibly talented and supportive in the comments and suggestions made, which I used to improve each of my drafts.
I’d highly recommend this workshop if you want to connect with like-minded people, discover new poets and receive invaluable feedback from a fantastic one. It’s given me six poems patiently waiting to be released when opportunity calls. Pretty good for six weeks’ worth of work I reckon.
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 was the synopsis of the online course I’ve just completed through the Poetry School.
Facilitated by Jennifer Wong, an engaging and insightful poet from Hong Kong, students were encouraged to explore unknown territory, step out of their comfort zone, to experiment with form and technique. Jenny shared work by Emily Berry, Ocean Vuong, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Christopher Reid, Naomi Shihab Nye, David Clarke, Karen Solie and Mimi Khalvati as inspiration, and also provided an extended reading list for those who want to fall further.
We drafted portrait poems, found poems, mirror poems, poems about names, historical happenings, ghazals and pantoums. And once again it was wonderful to connect with poets across the world to discuss work, exchange feedback, and share our own creative practice and inner being.
I participate regularly in the online Poetry School community and would highly recommend browsing their catalogue of courses—Jenny’s running another one, Possibilities of the line, later this year—because it’s always good to broaden those poetic horizons.
I’ve just finished an open workshop in which poets were asked to explore their own experiences of pain and develop them into poems to share with the group.
Hosted through The Poetry School’s online social network CAMPUS, the workshop was facilitated by Daniel Sluman and ran for two weeks comprising assignment, reading, writing time and live chat. Daniel is an amazing poet, whose work often explores the challenge of the body and the pain it can cause, with two collections to his name – his first, Absence has a weight of its own, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2012 and then his latest, the terrible, is also available from Nine Arches Press.
So we were asked to recall the most memorable moments in our lives that have involved pain and note three down. Well once I started, I found it difficult to stop and ended up with over seven on my list! We then had to think about these times in an objective way with a focus on detail and other senses, i.e. not just the sensation of pain, drawing on poems by Matthew Siegel and Sharon Olds as exceptional examples of how pain can be conveyed.
I managed to draft and share three poems, with notes for another five, and poets had to choose one to be work-shopped during the two-hour live chat session. Having this at 4:30am my time (7pm London time), I thought showed commitment to the craft!
It was a really useful exercise and I met some fantastic poets along the way, whom I hope to remain in contact with. Daniel asked if we thought this course could be expanded upon; most definitely, where there’s pain, either physical or emotional, there’s a lot to say and share.
After finishing Catherine Smith’s online feedback course earlier in the year through The Poetry School and finding it extremely useful, I thought it about time I enroll on another to give life to some poems that just want to sleep and do nothing all day. So I did.
I had heard good things about Bill Greenwell’s poetry clinic and discovered his work through Abegail Morley, an extraordinarily talented poet who Bill used to mentor. The course runs over 10 weeks and is hosted through an online learning environment out of Exeter University, with the absence of ‘live’ sessions suiting me perfectly due to the time difference.
The aim is simple – to share poems with other poets and an experienced and published tutor, cue Bill, for discussion and critique. So the idea is to present a poem a week, or two if time and length permits, and now half way through the course I have five poems to work on using invaluable feedback.
And even if widely published before, I believe a poet should never stop improving, learning and sharing to develop themselves, their work and fellow poets. Thus I’m in brilliant company, joined by the likes of Sharon Black and Valerie Morton, two poets with excellent track records, as well as solo collections.
So with that in mind I best get back to it. Stop blogging, making cups of tea, thinking about lunch…
I have just started my online feedback course through the Poetry School based in London hosted by Catherine Smith. Catherine’s work is just delicious, her collection of small stories, The Biting Point, evoke such powerful imagery in a hauntingly beautiful way.
The course runs over 10 weeks with members of the group uploading poems for feedback from each other on a fortnightly basis. Poets can upload as many versions of the same poem during this time, for Catherine to then feedback on the final version at the end of each two week slot. The idea is to dig out those ‘problem pieces’ that just don’t feel right – and I have plenty of these believe me, where I like a particular line or concept but something is just not working.
I’m finding it to be an incredibly useful experience, and have created a feedback document for each of my own pieces in which I’m saving all the comments I receive to later review the work with these to hand. And I’m meeting some wonderful like-minded poets along the way, who I hope to remain in contact with after the course has finished.
January has been a busy month. Other things keeping me buzzing are submissions – five achieved so far to a mixture of magazines and competitions – keeping up to date with the latest publications which yes, does involve purchasing some collections and books, and working out which sessions to attend during Adelaide Writers’ Week starting later this month. So having my wonderful Writer’s Diary has been an absolute saviour! It has really got me organised with submission deadlines, when to work on them in advance as I have, in the past, missed some due to a lack of allocated time, so every Friday now is just chock-a-block of what to achieve. The old paid job gets in the way 😉
Inkspill is a free online writing experience facilitated by awritersfountain over the last weekend in October.
I will be dipping in – will you…?
J V Birch 