Everything You Can Imagine is Real’: Poetry, the Real and the Surreal

Pablo Picasso once said, ‘Everything you can imagine is real.’ On this course we will aim to explore the full range of poetry’s approaches, from realistic representations of the world to highly surreal visions, which engage the full power of the imagination.

We will look at poets who write realistically on a range of subjects, from the family to the animal kingdom, the world of work to the life of the city, considering the way in which approaches such as observation, description and narrative can generate emotive poems.

We will also consider the way in which surreal poems create a joy, often simply by the nature of the strange things they show us. Even better, we will look at the way in which surrealistic visions and imagined scenarios can illuminate the realities of our emotional lives, allowing us to see more clearly as things get stranger.

Whether you’re keen to unleash the imagination more fully in your poems, or to give your visions a greater grounding in reality, this course will provide a range of strategies to allow your poems to sing with the weirdness of the everyday and the normality of the fantastic.