Module description
Designed to help you develop your skills in writing poems, and also in reading contemporary poetry with close attention to how helps in write your own work. In each seminar we discuss some contemporary poems, developing your attention to new techniques and voices, and workshop six of yours.
Assessment details
Mid-semester: 1 x 1500 word essay on one (or two) poems by a living poet, from a prescribed list (30%)
End-semester: Portfolio of 10 poems (70%)
Educational aims & objectives
To help students improve and develop their writing skills in poems for the page, strengthen their sense of tradition, progress on new poetic paths, and discover and refine their poetic voice.
Also, to learn how to re-draft and self-edit, closely and rigorously - a skill useful in writing anything, not only poetry.
Learning outcomes
A strengthened ability and formal experience in writing good poems for the page, and knowledge in how to go about publishing them.
On the Level 5 Writing Poetry module, students learned basic principles and techniques of writing good poems, and the practice of 'workshopping' their own and other people's poems. On this module, they develop their own personal take on these principles and skills and acquire the confidence to go forward on their own.
Teaching pattern
Teaching pattern: 1 x 2 hour seminar (workshop), weekly
Suggested reading list
- Jason Allen-Paisant, Self Portrait as Othello
- Derek Walcott, Collected Poems
- Don Paterson, 101 Sonnets: From Shakespeare to Heaney
- Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy
- Anthony Joseph, Sonnets for Albert
- Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head: Poems
- Gboyega Odubanjo, While I Yet Live
- More Fiya - A New Collection of Black British Poetry ed by Kayo Chingonyi
- Stephen Birt, The Poem is You: 60 American Poems and How to Read Them
- Ruth Padel, 52 Ways Of Looking At A Poem