A Digital Poetry Retreat with Jonathan Edwards and Guest Poet Patience Agbabi: Someone Else’s Shoes, Poetic Monologue
Join The Writing School Online for an exciting poetry-writing retreat you can access live, online from your own home. Take a week for yourself, 13th-17th September 2021, to experiment with poetry under the expert guidance of Costa Prize-winning poet Jonathan Edwards. Our Guest Poet will be Patience Agbabi.
From Robert Browning to Carol Ann Duffy, Patience Agbabi to Simon Armitage, a number of writers have explored the joy of how writing from the point of view of someone – or something – else can free the creative shackles and unleash poems of great power. In this course, you will explore a range of things that the monologue can do, looking at poems which draw on characters from canonical texts, from history and from pop culture. Monologue can be a way of exploring different occupations and backgrounds, of looking at important themes such as gender, class and place, as in Alan Gillis’s brilliant poem ‘In These Aisles’, but it can also be a way of seeing the world completely differently, through the eyes of an assumed object, animal, tree… You will spend some time reflecting on the nature of voice as a whole – the way in which every poem, by its language and framing, creates a voice which is independent from its author, to say what it wants or needs to. We'll consider how things like the vernacular and distinctive approaches to language can create a voice for a poem which is really alive. Through a mixture of close reading, written exercises and feedback, you will seek to develop your own monologues to surprise and delight, and to illuminate the world – and ‘the rumoured existence of other people’ (Timothy Donnelly) – with understanding and empathy.
Join us for an exciting writing course from your own home and a week of experimenting with poetry. Three hours of group workshops to inspire new work and techniques will be delivered digitally in the mornings, with afternoons set aside for your writing and one-to-one tutorials with the tutor, to help you improve your individual poems. You will be treated to two evenings of poetry readings and Q&As, one from Jonathan and one from our Guest Poet. In addition, we will enjoy an open mic and the course will end on Friday with a celebration of the work you have created during the sessions with us. Whatever stage you're at with poetry, this will be an inspiring week to recharge the imagination and to fuel a host of new poems.
The fee for the week (including 9 workshops, a 40 minute one-to-one tutorial, two readings, and other evening events) is £400. A £150, non-refundable, deposit is required on booking and places on the retreat will be capped at ten. Contact kathryn@thewritingschool.co.uk for more information and to book and pay for your place.
