Poetries, plural I Six-Week Poetry Workshop with Jack Underwood

​Poetries, plural

​This 6-week programme will take a broad and various view of poetics, examining how different kinds of poems ask to be read differently. You will read work from a range of schools and traditions, and consider how poetry offers us more than one way of holding and sharing knowledge, meaning or experience. As writers you will experiment with new poetic techniques and approaches, expanding your voice as a poet, while locating the particularities of language that make your work unique to you. There will be the opportunity to share your poems and writing exercises with your classmates in tutor-guided workshop sessions, and you will each receive a one-to-one tutorial with the programme tutor. This course is suitable for poets at the start of their writing journey who are curious about the different poetries and stylistic avenues available, but also suits poets who are more established in their practices, but want to move beyond their habits into new ways of writing and thinking about poetry.

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​Course Description

​This 6-week programme will take a broad and various view of poetics, examining how different kinds of poems ask to be read differently. You will read work from a range of schools and traditions, and consider how poetry offers us more than one way of holding and sharing knowledge, meaning or experience.

​As writers you will experiment with new poetic techniques and approaches, expanding your voice as a poet, while locating the particularities of language that make your work unique to you. This course is suitable for poets at the start of their writing journey who are curious about the different poetries and stylistic avenues available, but also suits poets who are more established in their practices, but want to move beyond their habits into new ways of writing and thinking about poetry.

​Workshop Time

​July 14  — August 25

​Every Tuesday (with a break on August 4)

​New York Time

​10am—12:30pm

​Course space limited to 6-16

​The workshop will meet once a week for six weeks, with each session running 2.5 hours in total. Across the course, we will be looking at poetry from 20th Century movements such as Modernism and the New York School, as well as innovative and original poets from the 21st century, exploring how different poetic approaches have evolved or been revived. We will be introducing useful terminology from literary criticism, theory and philosophy, as well as practical terms and ideas from creative writing studies.

​There will be the opportunity to share your poems and writing exercises with your classmates in tutor-guided workshop sessions, and you will each receive a one-to-one tutorial with the programme tutor.

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​Course Structure

​Week 1: What is “poetic”?

​Through metaphor, metonymy, connotation and contiguity, we will explore how shifting meanings create resonance and how meanings constellate towards notions of the ‘poetic’.

​Week 2: Difficulty and Accessibility

​Excavating the communal work of the imagination, its gaps and scopics, towards what lies beyond Meaning.

​Week 3: Formalisms, plural

​We will unpack the very foundations of poetry: the poetic form, line, syntax.

​Week 4: Modernisms, post and late

​What is Modernism and what has it taught us about language as material? We’ll think through poems that move away from the ‘traditional’ to offer us new and refreshing ways to consider language.

​Week 5: Casual Accumulation and Aboutness and the Wobble

​How might disparate ideas be linked through associative leaps? We will explore how connectivity and digressive routes can become powerful poetic threads.

​Week 6: Litany, anaphora, musicalties, plural

​How is a poem’s sonic landscape shaped? Exploring sound in language as a gravitational field that builds momentum and stakes.

​About Jack Underwood

​Jack Underwood is author of two poetry collections Happiness (Faber, 2015), and A Year in the New Life (Faber, 2021) and the non-fiction work, NOT EVEN THIS (Corsair, 2021). He co-presents and curates the Faber Poetry Podcast and is senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College.