Convenor and Tutor: Professor David Morley

Overview

The immersive poetry workshops encourage students to study and create poems, and to understand and adopt techniques that suit, as well as challenge, their developing voice as poets. There are workshops of different types of form, on conceptual art and guerrilla poetry, and on song, spoken word, and natural history. There is an emphasis on learning as an experience and event, group work, and real world creative practice. It will also give students an understanding of poetry’s role in human culture today, and the pleasures to be gained through artistic challenge and breakthrough. Graduates of this module have gone on to highly successful and significant careers in poetry, performance, and publishing.

Principal learning outcomes

By the end of the module the student should be able to work in several forms including the sonnet, villanelle, sestina, terza rima, shape poetry, asemic poetry, conceptual poetry; received an introduction to the work of some poets and how their work may be used as models for practice; acquired some knowledge of the power and practice of imagination in poetic creation; begun to acquire a practical understanding of their own poetics; and developed a realistic, up-to-date, and pragmatic knowledge of the marketplace for poetry.

Moodle

Access the Moodle Here

Reading

Have to hand the best dictionary and thesaurus you can afford and use them avidly to expand and deepen your choice of words. Do not use the thesaurus from the word-processing programmes as they are severely limited and limiting.

The Oxford Dictionary of Rhymes (latest edition);

The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics (latest edition);

Roget’s Thesaurus (latest edition);

Oxford English Dictionary;

John Keats, Letters (ed. John Mee, Oxford, 2009);

Mary Rueffle Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books, 2012);

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (Penguin 2012) – also on internet;

Michelle Boisseau and Robert Wallace Writing Poems (Longman Pearson, 2004);

Mary Kinzie A Poet’s Guide to Poetry (Chicago University Press, 1999);

Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux The Poet’s Companion (Norton, 1997);

William Packard The Art of Poetry Writing (St Martin’s Press, 1992);

Mary Oliver A Poetry Handbook (Harvest, 1994);

The Making of a Poem (Norton, 2000) ed. by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland;

John Hollander, Rhyme’s Reason (Yale, 2001).

Rhyme

The most useful and practical resource is The Oxford Dictionary of Rhymes (OUP, 2006) whose organisation is drawn from rhyme, speech, indirect rhyme, and syllable. It lists words that are both ancient and modern, literary, and everyday, and uses words drawn from place names, science, and technology.

 

Tutor

David Morley won the Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2016). Fury (2020) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. His other Carcanet collections include The Magic of What's There, The Gypsy and the Poet, Enchantment and The Invisible Kings. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

 

Assessment

Submit A and B.

Page specifications should be interpreted as follows: line space 1.5; font/size Times Roman, 12pt.

 

For 45 CATS

A. PORTFOLIO OF POETRY

EITHER

1. A sequence of poems / a long poem of between 20 and 25 pages

or

2. A portfolio collection of poems between 20 and 25 pages.

B. CRITICAL PROSE

EITHER

1. 2000-word commentary on the aims and processes involved in writing your portfolio

Or

2. 2,000 word essay on a critical issue that arises from the syllabus.

 

For 30 CATS

A. PORTFOLIO OF POETRY

EITHER

1. A sequence of poems / a long poem of between 13 and 17 pages

or

2. A portfolio collection of poems between 13 and 17 pages.

B. CRITICAL PROSE

EITHER

1. 1500-word commentary on the aims and processes involved in writing your portfolio

Or

2. 1500 word essay on a critical issue that arises from the syllabus.