The Course

The Details

North Sea Poets Autumn Course – 'Writing With ...' 

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📅 Wednesdays, 28th October - 9th December 2026, OR Saturdays, 31st October - 12th December 2026

⏰ Wednesdays, 7:30-9:30pm GMT, OR Saturdays, 11am-1pm GMT

Week 1 - 28th & 31st October - Writing with Trees – Kathleen Jamie

Kathleen Jamie explores how trees can generate poems through memory, place and symbol

Trees must count among our oldest and most enduring symbols and metaphors. Family, longevity, place-ness, seasonality and regeneration … these are just a few of the things trees stand for in our human imagination. They furnish us with memories, proverbs and images. In this session, we will explore and discuss some poems that feature trees or aspects of trees – and use tree-ness to generate new work.

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Week 2 - 4th & 7th November - Writing With Silence – Don Paterson

Don Paterson looks at how silence and omission can form and intensify poetic meaning

From Emily Dickinson to Charles Simic and WS Graham, many poets have experienced silence as poetry’s raw material – what dictates it, surrounds it, patterns it, and symbolises the limit of what it can say. In this class we’ll explore the many ways poets have engaged with silence – from the unsaid and the unsayable to the silences of secrecy, absence, grief and awe. Through both close reading and practical exercises, we’ll look at how the art of omission can make our language far more powerful – and how we might begin to translate that silence on the other side of the wall.

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Week 3 - 11th & 14th November - Writing With Long and Short Poems – Niall Campbell

Niall Campbell on the art of both long and short poems 

Let’s leave sonnets aside – and no more poems with four stanzas of four quatrains. We want to look at how to tackle long and short poems. How do you set the foundations for a long poem to sustain itself? How can it hold on to its energy? For shorter poems, how can we make sure they arrive as a surprise – and leave with the reader wanting more?

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Week 4 - 18th & 21st November - Writing with the Moon – Lesley Harrison

Lesley Harrison considers the Moon and its symbolic presence in our poetry

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From the lunar calendars of Lascaux, the moon has been a potent presence in our desire to make sense of our world through symbol.  Our nearest celestial neighbour, even its surface is mapped by its notional influences on our temper – serenity, madness, sterility, storms ... .  But how does it elude us?  ‘The moon has your name / memorized: the curl of your back; your face, an open book.’ (Vona Groarke, ‘Tonight of Yesterday’.)  In this workshop we will look at poems in which the moon enters our thinking, and how we invest it with a (temporary) significance.

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Week 5 - 25th & 28th November - Writing with Horses – Lisa Brockwell

Lisa Brockwell on what a good horse can do for a poem

The horse is central to human history: Jungian symbol of libido, instinct and the unconscious; also a beast of burden, mode of transport, comrade-at-arms, loyal companion, prey animal, mythical beast … Horses gallop through our history and our dreams in culturally and socially (and indeed sex-) specific ways. On the frontier, on the steppe, in the cavalry, on the farm, in work by Plath, Burns, Heaney, Banjo Paterson, Judith Wright, James Wright, Joy Harjo, Selima Hill – horses are everywhere in poetry. We’ll explore how horses carry symbolic meaning, how their sudden appearance can radically shift a poem’s perspective, and how theories of natural horsemanship might lead us to deeper readings.

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Week 6 - 2nd & 5th December - Writing With Legend and Myth – John Glenday

John Glenday on the continuing power and relevance of mythology 

'Homer has haunted me for more than sixty years' … Longley, Heaney, Carson, Walcott, Oswald, Robertson. What power do the old myths and legends hold over us, and why do they still resonate? In this workshop, we'll use discussion and example to analyse their relevance, and generate new work to illustrate how that relevance continues to influence both life and world.

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Week 7 - 9th & 12th December - Writing with Winter – Karen Solie

Karen Solie explores winter as a landscape of contradiction and contemplation, danger and plenitude

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Winter looms large in the poetic imagination. Frozen or sodden, fallow, dark, the physical austerity of the off-season can open a contemplative plenitude. As John Burnside wrote in ‘Alone’, his memoir of being lost on the Norwegian tundra, ‘what began as silence was really a nuanced fabric of faint or far off murmuring.’ But Burnside's experience also reveals to him the hubris of abstracting for imaginative purposes what can kill. In this session we will read poems that use winter as a stage where poverties meet, as MacNeice writes, "the drunkenness of things being various," and explore ways in our own writing to remain vulnerable to winter's contradictions.