Coffee-House Poetry

classes - spring 2012

workshops & seminars, sundays 12-3.30 pm, £28 (concs. £24)

advance booking only, with cheque, please, as our workshops/classes are frequently oversubscribed

• sun 5 feb: the magic of realism, neruda, vallejo and paz with c.l. dallat
• sun 19 feb: an exaltation of larks, themed writing-workshop with anne-marie fyfe
• sun 11 mar: late check-out, themed writing-workshop with anne-marie fyfe

programme details

sun 5 feb: the magic of realism, neruda, vallejo and paz with c.l. dallat (a number of requests for repeat from last season so do book early)

Discover three major Latin American poets (in translation), all three major world artists engaging with the local and universal, each from a particular perspective, Peruvian, Chilean or Mexican, yet all approachable, immediate, profoundly influential: a chance to spend Sunday in Santiago, Lima, Mexico City, the world: I’ll die in Paris in a shower of rain/ On a day I already remember (Vallejo); Hammers pound there above/ pulverized voices/ from the top of the afternoon (Paz); Taut and dry Spain was/ a day’s drum of dull sound (Neruda).

sun 19 feb: an exaltation of larks, themed writing-workshop with anne-marie fyfe

Songbirds, lovebirds, hummingbirds, birds of omen and birds of prey, signs of peace, auguries of death, harbingers of spring, messengers, thieves, mimics and scavengers, they flock into every species of lore and literature; from Aristophanes’ Birds, via Chekov’s Seagull, Poe’s Raven, Ibsen’s Wild Duck and Du Maurier’s—and Hitchcock’s—??The Birds??, to Suskind’s existentialist Pigeon: the poetic aviary has Hughes’ crow, Rimbaud’s rooks, Baudelaire’s owls, Coleridge’s albatross, Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird… A strange and interesting poetic exploration of avian anthropomorphs and feathered ‘friends’.

Anne-Marie Fyfe’s themed writing-workshops (19 Feb & 11 Mar) allow poets to work through responses to and memories of, and to develop ideas around, the chosen theme, prompted by examples and images from poetry, literature, visual arts and culture generally, leading—through specific exercises and writing time—to new draft poems and a chance to read back and evaluate in a constructive workshop environment.

sun 11 mar: late check-out, themed writing-workshop with anne-marie fyfe

Dropping cabin-bags, suitcases or a single knapsack onto the patterned carpet and listening to the door clunk shut, in yet another chain motel-room or B&B, is not just part of the poet’s or travel-writer’s experience nowadays but an increasingly everyday occurrence for all of us, as are the buzz of afternoon-tea lobbies and the silence of the late mezzanine bar. Discover hotels and motels in art and literature, wander again the corridors of memory with the wrong key-card, escape via multi-storey fire-exits, amble incognito into the marbled, gilded lobbies of the away-from-home imagination…

…plus, for the first time, the opportunity for the best poems from Troubadour ‘hotel’ workshops to appear alongside the best contemporary hotel poems in the first Troubadour themed anthology, scheduled for 2013 publication!

workshops & seminars, sundays 12-3.30 pm, £28 (concs. £24), all advance booking only, with cheque, please, as our workshops/classes are frequently oversubscribed.