Academy Mini : Spring 2024 with John McCullough & Fran Lock

Duration: 4 weeks
Dates: 7–30 May 2024

Applications are open until midnight UK Sunday 21 April 2024.

Dive into our four-week Academy Mini course with award-winning poets John McCullough and Fran Lock, to deepen and energise your practice. The Academy Mini offers the time and structure for a month’s intensive focus on your poetry, comprising:

• two-hour tutor-led classes each week from 7–9pm UK on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and

• a scheduled half hour individual tutorial each week. 

The programme is designed around a weekly tutor rotation. You will receive two weeks of teaching and tutorials from each of our two fantastic tutors. 

Workshops and tutorials will be delivered via Zoom. You will have access to a dedicated classroom space on Padlet, where you will be able to access course materials and ask any questions, as well as a Padlet board where you can share poems, feedback and discussion with the other members of your cohort.

Workshops are recorded and the recordings will be made available to you, password-protected on our Vimeo, the day after each session. At the end of the course you will receive a handout collating the course materials, as well as links to the session recordings, to revisit in future.

Course delivery is wholly online. We welcome applications from students anywhere in the world, but applicants should note that all teaching is provided in evenings UK time.

The Course Fee is £600. We are pleased to offer two fully-funded bursary places for low-income writers.

This course is selective and strictly limited to twenty places. Apply via cover note and poem sample through our Submittable, here:

Our Tutors

Our tutors are renowned practising poets with many years of experience in poetry, performance, teaching and mentoring:

John McCullough

Fran Lock

What will I learn?

To give you a sense of what you’ll be learning, here’s an indicative overview of the course syllabus:

WEEK 1 (Fran Lock)

1.1 SOMATICS — Writing and Ritual:

Somatic poetry is interested in the body as a site of social, imaginative, and political action. It's focus is not only on our physical processes, but the environments bodies exists within; what it means to write, think and exist under ecological and political conditions that have rendered our world variously unfit for habitation. Somatic poetry seeks to use the body to retune our attention to the world around us, to make – in the words of CAConrad – “a different kind of investment in the everyday.”

1.2 UNSOUND STRUCTURES — Disrupting Form & Function:

“It is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing...” – Emerson.

Well, okay Emerson, up to a point. But what happens when that architecture is unsound? When it produces a prison? Or enters a state of urban decay? Like it or not, we need to talk about form!

WEEK 2 (John McCullough)

2.1 ENERGY AND OBSERVATION (i) Urban Momentum

How can momentum and energy be generated in poems through the use of imagery, phrase-making and original observations? This session, we'll discuss techniques for evoking in writing the speed, sensory overload and information that characterize urban environments, looking at the roles played by features like line length and sentence structure.

2.1 ENERGY AND OBSERVATION (ii) Objects of Politics

This session's reading turns to a range of contemporary poets including Dorianne Laux, Marie Howe, Joy Harjo, Ted Kooser and Alex Dimitrov. We'll look at how physical detail can be used to create imagery that embodies political ideas around democracy, government and marginalization in a nuanced and multi-faceted way.

WEEK 3 (Fran Lock)

3.1 “COLONIZERS WRITE ABOUT FLOWERS” — Poetry & Protest

In this rapidly unravelling world, is there still such a thing as “radical” poetry? Did it ever exist? In this session we'll look at some notable waypoints in the history of poetry as protest, and explore some of its different rhetorical and aesthetic strategies.

3.2 DOOM IS INEVITABLE. GLOOM IS OPTIONAL! — Writing from Grief and Political Defeat

Welcome to the Anthropocene, population us. It's a suppurating landscape of political corruption, climate meltdown and unprecedented extinction. It's hard to know what a meaningful poetic response to such a world might look like, but in this session we'll explore some of the different – sometimes surprising – poetic strategies for grieving our burning world. Where does poetry go when it moves beyond the limits of merely feeling sad?

Week 4 (John McCullough)

4.1 REIMAGININGS - Re-Visioning

After the fiery heat of composition, getting a poem to publication standard usually involves a slower process of revision. In this first session, we'll look at strategies for developing and honing work, and the thoughts of Jenny Newman. We'll discuss areas to watch out for when editing and will tackle also the process of reimagining a poem - a more radical process of revision.

4.2 REVISIONS, REIMAGININGS - The Long Game

In this final session, we'll consider how editing can connect to the wider process of recycling smaller units - how strong images and phrases from an unsuccessful poem can often be reused. We'll look at the relationship between experience and imagination, and how writing for a wider readership often means letting go of self-expression during revision.

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