Coffee-House Poetry

classes - spring 2010

sundays 12-3.30 pm, £28 (concs. £24), advance booking only

• sun 24th jan, form and freedom: new creative-writing workshop with jo shapcott

• sun 31st jan, relishing difficulty: a c.l. dallat seminar on john ashbery, medbh mcguckian, jorie graham & others

• sun 14th feb, stranger than fiction: themed writing workshop with anne-marie fyfe

• sun 21st feb, memory and forgetting: new creative-writing workshop with mimi khalvati

• sun 21st mar, the art in the everyday: writing workshop with c.l. dallat

programme details

sun 24th jan, form and freedom: new creative-writing workshop with jo shapcott

Form and freedom needn’t be in an either/or relationship: a workshop on why and when we do and don’t use form as an empowering constraint, how attention to scansion enhances our stanzas… And how the sonnet with all its formal patterning and conventional rules can liberate our poetic power.

sun 31st jan, relishing difficulty: a c.l. dallat seminar on john ashbery, medbh mcguckian, jorie graham & others (repeated by request)

Is accessibility essential? Is difficulty — valued in many other arts, many other aspects of life — uniquely problematic in poetry? Or do we mistrust wilful difficulty as the opposite of candour, authenticity? Spend a Sunday afternoon discovering some notionally difficult poets, and find out if difficulty is or isn’t part of the pleasure, is or isn’t its own reward…

sun 14th feb, stranger than fiction: themed writing workshop with anne-marie fyfe (repeated by request)

As exceptions prove rules, so the extraordinary, isolated, eccentric, idiosyncratic, surreal and frankly improbable often best exemplify the very ordinariness to which artists, photographers, dramatists and poets attempt to hold the undistorted mirror. This themed workshop uses examples from poetry, literature, visual arts and culture generally, leading to new draft poems and a chance to read back and evaluate in a constructive workshop environment.

sun 21st feb, memory and forgetting: new creative-writing workshop with mimi khalvati

Inspired by the essays in Memory (ed. Harriet Harvey Wood & A.S.Byatt) this workshop starts with discussion/reflection on memory as focus for writing, looks at remembering and forgetting in poetry and, taking autobiographical prose from Bishop, Woolf & others, leads to writing exercises based on both clear and incomplete or vague memories, and finds ways to explore and build on these.

sun 21st mar, the art in the everyday: writing workshop with c.l. dallat (first presented at Aldeburgh 2009)

We’re always told to write what we know but there are unknown knowns in the everyday that we can bring into sharp, precise focus to make poems that engage and excite. Participants aren’t expected to unearth exceptional incidents and memories but are enabled to make the ordinary extra-ordinary. Discover and develop your own polished piece of art from the quotidian.