The Poetry Workshop The University of Sydney

Overview

Poetry—reading it and writing it—improves our prose, as well as our lives—by making us more mindful of the language we use. The function of poetry, wrote the haiku master Basho “is to rectify common speech.” So prose writers, and everyone who writes at work, will benefit from what the workshop demonstrates about all that poetry knows (about language and life).

What you will learn

By the end of The Poetry Workshop offered by University of Sydney, you should be able to:

• discover what goes on inside a poem, how to make your sing and how to see and write your life more fully

• unpack some fine poems that may show you how to write your own with more grace

• write poems in new ways

• utilise the insightful feedback received on your work

• practise the techniques that poets, through the ages, employ to wake your language and your lives more fully to the facts and mysteries of existence

• employ some forms, tricks and devices to attend more closely to your language and turn out poems more likely to satisfy yourself and find your way to publication.