Poetry Workshop 1

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 5
• Convenor: to be confirmed
• Assessment: to be confirmed

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. St Augustine.

See the world in a different way: contemporary poetry of Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia

No queues, no security checks, no footprints, no delays. In this module we travel far and wide without leaving Bloomsbury, through poetry being written around the world today.

Following an itinerary of close readings, writing exercises and workshops, we will immerse ourselves in the literal and figurative visions of poets seeing the world from a perspective and in a language that is not ours, exploring new ways of allowing our experiences to enliven our perspective on the world and our writing in it. En route, we will develop a sense of what's now and new in poetry out there.

Among the themes we will visit are:

• staying within and going beyond borders
• cultural liberties and aesthetic restraints
• what it means to be of a particular time and place
• what it means to feel like a stranger
• what it is to be at home
• what it means to be far from home 
• in what ways poetry and travel can be said to be, in some essential sense, alike.

Because we will be reading poetry which, even in translation, will feel foreign, we will also take a brief tour of some of the philosophical and practical questions of translation.

Together we will visit the National Gallery, where we will translate a painting into a poem, and you will also be required to view a contemporary foreign film of your choice.

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• demonstrate awareness and control of the elements of poetry
• discuss and evaluate the work of fellow students and established writers in relation to elements of craft
• interpret, self-evaluate and communicate constructive feedback
• maintain a regular writing habit and produce more effective creative work independently
• use language more confidently, precisely and imaginatively
• experiment with style and form
• solve craft-related problems in your poetry writing
• deepen your knowledge and understanding of world poetry
• think critically and independently about creative works you have written and read
• edit and revise, and apply technique and critical analysis to the development of a piece of creative work.