OSL Course: Creative Writing ‘Poetics – A Practioner’s Guide’

Creative Writing ‘Poetics – A Practioner’s Guide’

Online skills course | 2, 9, 16, 30 October and 6 November 2020, 12:00-15:00 | Coordinator: Dr David Ashford (Groningen) | 5 EC

Open to: PhD candidates and RMA students; OSL members have first access.

Registration 

This course will introduce participants to poetic genres, forms and metres, enabling them to develop, or to expand upon their own practice, as creative writers. Participants will study poetry from a variety of traditions, in order to understand how poetic form is determined by its original context in performance, and by the information, musical and theatrical technologies necessary to that original performative context. Far from being arbitrary or inorganic restrictions upon individual creativity, poetic form will emerge as the response to a context in performance that may since have been lost; as something organic, evolving and (potentially) still very much alive. Over a series of seminars and creative writing workshops, featuring poets invited to reflect upon their own practice, participants will investigate how ancient poetics have been (and might be) adapted for the creation of contemporary poetries, being introduced to recent research on creative writing as an historical and a discursive phenomenon. In addition, participants will learn to use creative-writing techniques as a form of artistic research and as an element of their methodologies.