Exploring poetry

Course Programme

Sunday 20 November 2016

10:00 Introducing ourselves and our aims. What is poetry? Warm up exercise: collaborative introductory poem.
11:15 Coffee
11:45 Finding the form. Organic verse invented. Where are the boundaries? Formal and free verse.
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Sound and silence: 'Text says what it dos not say.' Macherey.
15:15 Tea
15:30 Writing a sonnet & Refining your work. Discussing it. Stage versus page (followed by: Open Mic )
16:45 Day school ends

About the tutors

Caron Freeborn was a mature student at Cambridge where she subsequently taught for 12 years, specializing in the Tragedy paper. She has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University and now teaches at ARU on both their BA and MA programmes in creative writing. Caron started her writing life as a novelist (Three Blind Mice, 2001; Prohibitions 2004) and is now a poet. Her first full collection of poetry, Georges Perec is my hero, came out in 2015.

Elizabeth Speller was an undergraduate and post graduate at Cambridge. She has taught at Bristol, Birmingham and Cambridge and was an Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Warwick University. She now teaches creative writing at Madingley Hall.

Elizabeth is an author of fiction, non-fiction, journalism and poetry. Her novel The Return of Captain John Emmett (Virago) was Orange book of the Month and among other awards, her poetry has been in second place for the Bridport Prize and was short listed for the Forward Prize.