Poetry workshop presented by Nottingham Poetry Series
4 Thursday evenings, 16 April – 7 May, 6.30 – 8.30 pm and all day Saturday, 16 May 2015
University of Nottingham main campus — University Park
Open to all who are interested in poetry and visibility, at any level of writing experience. We’re exploring the relationship of writing, a sense of space and putting poetry into that space by changing media.
Led by published poets Neele Dellschaft and Carol Rowntree Jones, this course will help you develop your writing and offer new directions for your poetry. Guest tutor Ian Duhig will work with us on ‘desearching’ as a way of thinking about place in our writing.
Course fee: £45. Please send a short letter stating why you wish to take the course and a sample of your writing (this can be in any form) to hello [at] nottinghampoetryseries.com by 7 April.
UPDATE: New deadline for signing up is now Thursday, 16 April, the day of the first workshop.
Course details
Participants will be encouraged to explore the intersection of poetry and the physical world. We will examine how a sense of place informs our writing, and how the space our writing inhabits can expand the writing/reading experience for ourselves as writers and for the reader. We will take ‘space’ to encompass the physicality of the poem on the page or in a book, and also as ‘site’, as we experiment in taking our work out into the city and situate it in public spaces. We will explore how changes in medium may alter the life, meaning and experience of the poem.
During the course, participants will be able to make new work and experiment in transferring their words into multiple media and across sites.
We will look at the work of Anne Carson, Mark Doty, Linda Gregg, Seamus Heaney, Kathleen Jamie, Agnes Lehoczky and others. We will do writing exercises together. We will examine examples of poems in different book forms and as texts recorded in different physical forms in the outside world, as well as the conceptual states of poetry: public vs. private, open vs hidden.
Ian Duhig will spend time with us and lead a workshop on his Digressions project, introducing his ideas on desearch as a way of unearthing work.
For our day-long session participants will chose one of their own poems and work towards representing it in another material form. Projects might extend to book binding, embroidery, text on glass, text on concrete. We will respond to each other’s projects in a final writing exercise and will document the work photographically.
Who we are
Carol Rowntree Jones and Neele Dellschaft are emerging poets who have studied and developed projects together over the last five years.
Carol won the inaugural Overton Poetry Prize and her pamphlet This is not normal behaviour has just been published by Lamplight Press. She was shortlisted for the Basil Bunting Poetry Prize 2015. Her short story “Level and Nearly Unaffected” was joint winner of the 2013 Asham Award for women’s short fiction and was published by Virago.
Neele is a German poet, scientist and maker. The author of I come home and I move differently (MIEL 2012) and Call it an Immersion (Dancing Girl Press 2015), Neele’s work appears or is forthcoming in literary magazines including 111O, Lighthouse and the Carolina Review Quarterly Review.
