I’m delighted that I’ll be teaching a ten-week course for the Poetry School, starting in January 2025.
In Hymns to Life: Poetry, Documentary & Time, we’ll explore how we can play with time as an essential ingredient in writing poetry.
Together, we’ll consider how life events, great and small, can shape our poetry – and how, in return, poetry may reveal the shapes of our lives. We’ll try different ways of writing life as it happens, before returning to and reworking our texts with the benefit of time.
We’ll explore how we might record our contemporary world through documentary poetry, and how we might connect personal stories to deeper histories.
I’ve selected the work of many wonderful poets to guide us. We’ll look at works by Bernadette Mayer, M. NourbeSe Philip, Sean Borodale, James Schuyler, Nat Raha, Frank O’Hara, Alice Oswald, and Nicole Sealey, to name a few.
In all my teaching I offer a range of ways in, with plenty of options to explore further or come back to an exercise when you have more time and energy.
By the end of the course, you will have developed a toolkit of techniques to enrich your poetry now and throughout your writing life.
The course is open to poets of all levels and takes place online. There are no live chats or seminars, so you can join in from wherever you are in the world, on your own time. It starts on Tuesday 21st January and booking is now open!
Courses at the Poetry School often sell out quickly, so I’d recommend booking sooner rather than later. Concessions are available.
Flo Reynolds 