Poetry is language's recreation ground. You go there to have fun, but you end up learning about so many things. In this six-morning course, you will be taken from original ideas through towards a final draft.
The first day will be the playground of creating a poem, from the toddler steps of a word, to the swing of the line, the climbing frame of constructing sentences, and the slide of the poem’s journey towards an ending.
In the second session, you will learn about keeping notebooks, free-writing, capturing thought. Effective poems often have a turn or twist, something so delicate it cannot be paraphrased, with the form and subject working together. We shall look at early drafts and notebooks from well-known poets to see how they achieved this.
The third session will be an informal lesson on the Ws and Hs of a poem: what are you going to write, why are you writing, who are you writing for, when will you write it, which methods will you use, and how will it be written.
The fourth day will be like walking a dog, or as Klee nearly said, taking the pen for a walk. We shall explore form, subject, voice and line-break, producing first drafts of poems, using workshopping and close reading. We shall look closely at how a range of poets have worked from their early drafts through successions of versions: what to cut out, places where a gap may say more than having a situation spelt out.
On the fifth day the questions of session 3 will be reframed, and after you have written a draft of the poem, you can ask: what does the poem say, why is the poem the way it is, who speaks in the poem, (what is the) when of the poem (the tense, the relation to time), which parts could be changed, and how does the poem sound?
The sixth day will be for the park-run of consolidation, the finish-line of a final draft. Emphasis throughout will be on recognising the unique qualities of language when it is given the opportunity to break free from actually having to write a message. As Frank O’Hara said, that is what telephones are for.