Three monthly online poetry feedback session to polish your poems in the new year.
How do you make a good poems really good? Join a high quality online poetry feedback group to focus on honing your poetry. Receive encouragement, inspiration and constructive feedback, and get your poems ready for submission.
Poets from UK & Australia with feature reader Sarah Holland-Batt, share their courageous connections with land and people through poetry. Part of the UK/Australia Season of Culture: Who are we now? How can we describe, challenge or create new connections with our land and people in the 2020s? Free poetry reading.
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Explore one of the oldest poetic forms, the ghazal and what happens when it is transformed into the ‘postmodern.’ Can you adapt or repurpose the ghazal with contemporary Western poetics? Writing a ghazal takes you into a different terrain, culturally, musically and also in terms of philosophy .What are the challenges that are brought to bear when Western poets take up the form in English? Mona will look at the foundations and philosophy of ghazals and explore a different ways that poets across the globe are reengaging with this mercurial form.
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This is the first workshop in a series (each one is independently booked) expressing what we are facing in order to then re-invent new ways of seeing, thinking and living with our planet as part of nature This session focuses on recognising the current situation & reflecting on new ways of seeing – Writing the Emergency.
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Poetry with Fire in its Belly with Malika Booker – Monday 12 April 2021
contact me to join the waiting list (more masterclasses are to come)
The winner of the 2020 Forward Prize for the best single poem (with a poem which focused on the death of her mother), Malika Booker is a poetry powerhouse. Spending time with her is always inspiring and will jettison your creativity and poetry to new places. She is well known for her passionate, direct, empathetic and emotionally intelligent poetry. She often tackles difficult, traumatic or taboo subjects. (Some of you came a reading she featured in that I hosted last year where she set our Zoom screen on fire.)
Malika will explore how to be bold, daring and to stay with your poems for longer with more depth. Learn from a poetry master on how you can write about weighty, political, social and often personally difficult issues with authenticity and passion.
Malika will look at examples of contemporary poetry tackling some of the major issues of our time. We will discuss how these poems give permission, as well as offer techniques in order to write your own poems of magnitude. She will explore how African and Caribbean writers use techniques to explore what is often hidden, unspoken and systemically oppressive. There will be some sharing (but particularly as you may write about things that are challenging for you in your notebooks, there is no pressure to share at all.)
Malika Booker, is a poet, theatre-maker, performer and multi-disciplinary artist of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage. She is winner of a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award for poetry. She has won and been shortlisted for the Forward Best Single Poem Prize. Her collection Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press) was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas and the Seamus Heaney Centre prize.
Limited to 14 people only. 2.5hrs long with a short break.
Double check your timezones – UK 10.30am // Western Australia 5.30pm // Australian EST 7.30pm
A useful link for checking other time zones: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html
£27GBP // $55AUD
Online on Zoom
What is poetry? What does it mean to you? How does it work? In this workshop we’ll look at some of the key aspects of reading and writing poetry. It’s for those who are relatively new to poetry or those who want to take a fresh or closer look at its foundations, key features and techniques. We discuss a range of different contemporary poems and what makes them work. We’ll have a go at writing poetry.
10.30am UK // 5.30pm Western Standard Time Australia // 7.30pm Eastern Standard Time Australia
2.5 hours long, maximum 14 people
£25 GBP / $45 AUD
After the foundation workshop you might choose to join a new monthly group HERE – just reading poetry together OR reading & writing together. I reckon it’s one of the most enjoyable and stimulating activities you can do! A regular group is one of the key things that has helped take my poetry much further and has given me some of my most fabulous friendships.
Australian Cath Drake’s collection ‘The Shaking City’ (Seren Books), highly commended in the 2020 Forward Prizes, was described by Philip Gross as ‘a guide to staying clear-eyed, combative and caring in unsettling times.’. It follows ‘Sleeping with Rivers’ which won the Seren/Mslexia poetry pamphlet prize and was a Poetry Book Society choice. Cath’s prizes include a second in the 2017 Resurgence Poetry School eco-poetry prize (now called Ginkgo) and highly commended in 2019. She teaches writing in the UK, Australia and online. She’s an award-winning journalist and nonfiction writer and also a mindfulness teacher.
The most enjoyable way to share and learn poetry is in a regular small group. You can choose to do just the one hour monthly poetry reading group or you can choose the longer reading and writing poetry session monthly.
We have a place for one person to join for the last TWO workshops for someone who wants to read and write poetry. Ideal if you have a little bit of writing experience, or if you haven’t you should fit in fine too.
13 June, 11 July, 8 Aug, 12 Sept
10.30am UK // 5.30pm Western Standard Time Australia // 7.30pm Eastern Standard Time Australia
1 hour poetry reading group (you can choose just this half)
15 mins break
then 1.5 hours writing group, maximum 10 people (2.45 hours in total)
reading group only = £40 (all four sessions)
reading and writing = £100 (all four sessions)
£50 for the last two sessions
In the first part of the workshop we will tackle a theme or poet each month with an inspiring batch of poems sent in advance. We’ll look in depth at the poems, poets and poetic technique with expert guidance. It’s an ideal ‘book club’ – you don’t need to read a whole book (although I can recommend books) and the discussions are rich and life-nurturing.
If you are interested in writing poetry as well, then after a 15mins break we write together and share our writing for 1.5 hours. Each week we will discuss approaches and techniques to writing poems, share our writing and you’ll be given an assignment for the following week. This is designed to kick off a poetry writing practice.
You can take these workshops whether or not you have done the foundation workshop, but you might want to consider doing the Foundation Workshop first (not essential).
Australian Cath Drake’s collection ‘The Shaking City’ (Seren Books), highly commended in the 2020 Forward Prizes, was described by Philip Gross as ‘a guide to staying clear-eyed, combative and caring in unsettling times.’. It follows ‘Sleeping with Rivers’ which won the Seren/Mslexia poetry pamphlet prize and was a Poetry Book Society choice. Cath’s prizes include a second in the 2017 Resurgence Poetry School eco-poetry prize (now called Ginkgo) and highly commended in 2019. She teaches writing in the UK, Australia and online. She’s an award-winning journalist and nonfiction writer and also a mindfulness teacher.
The English language is beautifully musical. Robert Frost called sound in poetry ‘the gold in the ore’. In this workshop we will examine the sonic properties of vowels and consonants and how to use them effectively to enhance the meaning of a poem and add dramatic and emotional depth.
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‘I for one can barely tell where I trail off and you begin, since human beings are reported to be 98 percent duct tape and feathers anyway, ‘ says James Tate.
Dive into the surreal, beyond the realistic or currently imaginable to find new truths, to shake out the everyday and all its assumptions – that’s what Caroline Bird’s often wonderfully surreal writing and her inspiring workshops do, and it’s what we need more of as we re-invent ourselves in the 2020s Anthropocene.
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