The Course

Week 1 – Don Paterson: What’s a Poem Anyway?  

This introductory workshop will take a deep breath then a deeper dive into a place that poets often leave curiously unexplored: what is a poem?  ​Join the entire Poetry Fundamentals course via the Buy Tickets button below

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The Details

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

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📅 Wednesdays, 17th September-29th October

⏰ 7:30-9:30pm BST

Course sequence TBC

Writing with Landscape – Kathleen Jamie 

‘Everything happens somewhere’, but in this session we’ll consider some poems in which landscape features not just as a ‘setting’ but as an essential part of the atmosphere. Amongst other places, we’ll visit Gary Snyder’s Sierra Nevada, the Scottish glens of Marion Angus, the Inuit Arctic of Ng Nanouk Okpik. There are Emily Dickinson’s micro-landscapes too, and if we dare, we’ll venture into the Celtic netherworld of Thomas the Rhymer, or Rilke’s Hades. 

Writing with Heaney – Niall Campbell 

Seamus Heaney is generally associated with the homestead, with the world of labour, with musicality – but this session will explore Heaney as an innovator and technical trickster. How can we enliven our poetry so it can leap through time? How can we navigate the poem’s turn so subtly that it hides the whirring gears of its craft? How can we write to invite more than one voice in the room of the poem? Writing together, we’ll seek answers in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. 

Writing with Ghosts – Lesley Harrison 

In this session we will look at ways in which archive documents have been interpreted by poets to release or realise the voices embedded in them, making them vivid and significant for a contemporary audience. Is poetry particularly suited to this? Is this an ethical practice, or should some things be left alone? And who is the author of the new poem – the poet, or the original speaker? Both? After discussing recent examples, participants will experiment with some archive texts to see what kind of poetry they inspire. 

Writing with Plath – Don Paterson 

In the public imagination, Sylvia Plath's work has long been confused with her biography and early death. Among poets, however, she is still regarded as master of image and symbol, formal technique and rhetorical power. This class will concentrate on what we can learn from Plath's skill with the poetic line, her concentration of dramatic energy, her transformation of the mundane – and most of all, her astonishing gift for the unforgettable phrase. Most poets who write quickly also sound like it, but Plath shows how we might use our technical fluency to transfer the immediate energy of the moment directly to the page. 

Writing with Death – Karen Solie 

In ‘After a Death’, Tomas Tranströmer writes: “Once there was a shock / that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.” Though to grieve death is a fundamental human experience, it can be among the most difficult to articulate. In a session that will include examples of elegies for personal and public losses, discussion, and writing time guided by a series of simple prompts, we will explore ways into addressing the inevitable and irresolvable. 

Writing with Bishop – Lisa Brockwell 

Wrestling with questions of travel, home, exile, and how we find and map our bearings, Elizabeth Bishop’s poems examine physical and human geography, time, and the contradictions between our internal and external worlds. Often described as a ‘poet’s poet’, Bishop’s music is subtle and precise. From her work, we can learn how restraint and patience allow imaginative space to be opened up in a poem, making room for the reader. We will look at a range of Bishop’s poems and undertake reading and writing exercises based on her work. 

Writing with Artists – John Glenday 

Van Gogh described his drawings as his souvenir of gratitude to the world. In this workshop, combining a discussion of ekphrastic poems with generative exercises, we’ll look at some of the ways the visual arts can be used as a stimulus, a starting point or a framework for creating new work.