Poets' Workshop

If you are in receipt of a UK state benefit, you are a full-time student in the UK or a student on a low income, you may be eligible for a reduction of 50% of tuition fees. Please see the below link for full details:

Concessionary fees for short courses

To develop the skills, themes, autonomy and critical abilities of poetry writers in supportive and informal surroundings by rigorous examination of the students' own work, encouragement of their own initiatives, and the detailed exploration of useful ideas and techniques.

Course objectives:

• To create a cohesive, mutually supportive, but rigorous group in which students' own work can be developed and evaluated.
• To develop a variety of workshop protocols that encourage initiative and autonomy, as well as allowing the students' own work to be discussed in detail.
• To explore and debate technique and poetry-related ideas in order to participate, and improve good practice in current poetry writing.

Teaching and Learning will take place mainly in group discussions and sometimes small group work followed by plenary sessions. During each class students will be introduced briefly to the work of contemporary and earlier poets as a means of exploring different styles of poetic practice and forms, and to help provide prompts for the writing of their own poems, but the students’ own work will be the main focus each week in the workshops. 

By the end of the course students will be expected to:

• write and redraft poems to final draft stage, and control techniques developed and adapted to their own writing;
• demonstrate an understanding of the ideas, themes, and concerns of contemporary and earlier poets as related to their own practice and those of their peers; 
• have developed considerable autonomy in their own writing and be able to give sound, in-depth judgements of the writing of others.

Formative assessment each week in workshop - peer review and tutor advice, specific and general.

Termly assessment, Option A: folder of four poems from each student to be assessed at the end of each term.

Coursework is an integral part of all weekly classes and everyone enrolled will be expected to do coursework in order to benefit fully from the course. Only those who have registered for credit will be awarded CATS points for completing work the required standard.

Students must submit a completed Declaration of Authorship form at the end of term when submitting your final piece of work. CATS points cannot be awarded without the aforementioned form - Declaration of Authorship form

The Department's Weekly Classes are taught at FHEQ Level 4, i.e. first year undergraduate level, and you will be expected to engage in a significant amount of private study in preparation for the classes. This may take the form, for instance, of reading and analysing set texts, responding to questions or tasks, or preparing work to present in class.

Credit Accumulation and Transfer Scheme (CATS)

To earn credit (CATS points) you will need to register and pay an additional £30 fee per course. You can do this by ticking the relevant box at the bottom of the enrolment form or when enrolling online. Students who register for CATS points will receive a Record of CATS points on successful completion of their course assessment.

Students who do not register for CATS points during the enrolment process can either register for CATS points prior to the start of their course or retrospectively from the January 1st after the current full academic year has been completed. If you are enrolled on the Certificate of Higher Education you need to indicate this on the enrolment form but there is no additional registration fee.