Course description
Steven O’Brien teaches our five week poetry course aimed at enthusiasts and beginners alike. The course will provide an immersion in the world of contemporary and traditional poetics, both as reading experience and also as creative practice. Participants will learn how to cultivate and appreciate their own poetic utterance in response to the work of poets from the published canon. You will learn how to shape and distil your poems and begin to see the potential for publication. The emphasis will be on an appreciation of poetry as living literary form in all its daring, publically exuberant and personally enjoyable manifestations.
The schedule for each week comprises a critical exploration of published poems, followed by a creative seminar where participants undertake writing tasks. Copies of key poetic texts will be supplied.
Course Content
Week 1: Introduction
A perusal of accessible modern and formal poetry with the aim of focusing students on the imperatives of structure and framing expressions. 'Honouring the space of the page' is a key concept here. The readings will be varied, including examples from Dylan Thomas, Moniza Alvi and T. S. Eliot. The writing tasks will concentrate on concepts of the poetic – specificities of refrain, alliteration, cadences and more.
This session will set the critical/creative framework for the subsequent taught classes.
Week 2: Establishing Voice
The key concept of this session will be to ask students to become aware of their own poetic voices. We will look at John Bejteman, Edward Thomas and Federico Lorca – three poets defined by very particular styles/tones of writing.
The creative tasks will focus on students tapping their favoured expressions, word hoards and associations.
Week 3: Sonnets.
A journey into the formal tensions of the Shakespearean Sonnet, together with readings from modern poets (Peter Abbs, Larkin) who experiment with the sonnet form. Tasks will encourage students to write two timed sonnets.
This session will also will also fuse the concept of ‘found poetry’ as a creative stimulus.
Week 4: Heaney and Hughes - Living the Work
In this session, we will look at the supportive prose of Ted Hughes and the poetic commitment of Seamus Heaney. The emphasis will be on drawing on everyday experience to serve as the imaginative kindling for poetic utterance.
The creative session will be augmented by crafted readings of students’ poems generated from previous sessions.
Week 5: Affairs of the Heart
We will explore shades of emotion, including the erotic, the romantic and the melancholy. Contemporary poets such as Patricia McCarthy, Grey Gowrie and Edward Lucie-Smith will be the poetic pathfinders here.
The final creative session will attempt to cohere and shape deep feeling on the page.
We will also explore publication possibilities with a perusal of the submission guidelines of various current journals and magazines.
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