Poetry Workshops
This year's series of Poetry on the Move poetry workshops will be run completely online in a 'slow' workshop mode. Facilitated by poets Owen Bullock, Subhash Jaireth, Melinda Smith and Lucy Alexander, each workshop is scheduled to run over the course of a week. The workshops will be free of charge, though limited to 20 participants each. Details of how to register and participate to follow.
Owen Bullock
The Haiku Journey
September 21-25
Haiku has had a long evolution. It began with long-form Japanese poetry resembling ‘free verse’, which spawned the ‘envoy’, a short summary of the longer poem, which became popular, and known first as waka and later as tanka. As waka evolved they tended to be written in two sections: an observation of nature followed by a personal or philosophical reflection on it. Waka were also written in sequences, in the literary parlour game known as renga. Some, like Bashō, were particularly adept at composing the observation and wrote them for their own sake – they later became known as haiku. In this week-long virtual workshop, we’ll sample each of these forms and write them, condensing time in a rapid celebration of the whole haiku journey.
Subhash Jaireth
Translation: The Songs of Mirabai
October 6-10
In this workshop poets/translators will work on the translation of two poems/songs by a mystic Rajasthani poet Mirabai (1498-1556). Mirabai was a poet, singer and dancer and a devotee of Hindu god Krishna. She is revered as one of the prominent voices of the Bhakti Movement: a movement of religious reformation which valued personal engagement with deities more than the traditional ritualistic practices.
Each poet/translator will have access to three documents: the original poem in Rajasthani; a line-by-line English paraphrase; and an audio recording of the songs in Rajasthani. In his brief introduction Subhash Jaireth will provide, biographical, historical and cultural contexts with which the poems were written.
Lucy Alexander
The Luminous Familiar:
Poetry Transforming the Everyday
October 26-30
What is ‘everyday’ and ‘ordinary’ in our own lives, may not be to readers. By examining how poets, working in different forms and from diverse cultural backgrounds, take an arcane moment or object and transform it through their lens, this workshop aims to show how to bring luminous insight into our own ‘boring’ moments. Participants will generate original work based upon the techniques studied through this workshop.
Finding Poems in the Archive
November 2-6
Join Melinda Smith to explore the world of the archive and its potential for poetry. We'll think about issues of power and narrative control as we explore techniques for working with archival text including making found poems, erasures, and text manipulations. Feel free to bring your own archival raw materials.