The Architecture of Surprise: Writing Poems, Prose Poems and (Lyric) Essays

To ‘essay’ means to try, and a good essay is a mode of exploration: essayists put pen to paper not simply to communicate what they already know, but to pursue hunches and uncover connections. Similarly, a good poem of any kind ‘must ride on its own melting’, as Robert Frost put it, ‘like a piece of ice on a hot stove’: ‘no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader’. Like its prose cousin the essay, then, the poem should carry not only its reader but also its author to forms of words, and to imaginative spaces, they could never have anticipated arriving at. Glyn Maxwell argues that poetry has more in common with screenplay than with any kind of imaginative prose. But then, he also dismisses the prose poem – literature’s most mulish hybrid, and entirely its own creature – as ‘prose written by a poet’.

Are you attracted to genre-bending work? Keen to give your writing a vitamin boost by trying something new? Then this is the course for you! Over six days, we’ll delve into key techniques for evolving a range of pieces of lyric writing. From steering free verse into organic form to manipulating the elastic band of the sentence in prose poems, and from point of view in the poem (why does no-one speak of point of view in poetry?) to finding the right voice, style and shape for an essay, you’ll absorb important principles for how best to realise your preoccupations in words. Seminar-style discussions centred on sample poems, prose poems and essays, and on a small amount of related discursive material, will be complemented by practice periods, in which you’ll work with exercises designed to hone your craft and spark your imagination, and workshop-style peer and tutor feedback sessions. We’ll begin with the free verse poem (days one and two), then move to the essay (days four and five) via a pitstop with the prose poem (day three). At the end of the week, the course will culminate in presentations of work written in the preceding days.

Like ‘creative non-fiction’, prose poems and lyric essays may seem like contradictions in terms. On this course – which will suit students interested in writing across forms and into the spaces between them – you’ll experience them (and, indeed, what Sylvia Plath called the ‘smallish, unofficial, garden-variety’ lyric poem) as sites of positive perplexity and fruitful abundance, and as sources of startling illumination.