From Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ to Frank O’Hara’s ‘To the Film Industry in Crisis,’ there’s a rich history of great poems responding to the varied global tradition of all sorts of art. In this course we will see all sorts of cultural production – paintings and sculpture, but also film, television, literature, music, photography, social media and, above all, other poems – as potential inspiration.

Whether we think of Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo,’ the way Patience Agbabi and Carol Ann Duffy’s monologues give voice to fictional, pop culture and biblical characters, or the way Chen Chen’s poems often use film references to illuminate emotional situations, it’s often the case that great poems are in dialogue with other great cultural productions. The reality is that our poems will be read in rooms where music is blaring, there’s a watercolour on the wall, a line of books on a shelf and the whole of human history sitting there in a smart phone, and this course will consider a range of ways of creating poems that know this.

Having so much history to draw on, so many people creating, means that the course will have lots of different approaches to explore. A TV programme can offer an effective way into elegy, a record collection might generate a sonnet sequence, a Facebook message a trip into history. Surreal works of art and the world of cartoons can inspire the most inventive narratives. Ultimately, all of these ideas can offer us exciting ways into poems which might illuminate the greatest artwork of all – our own lives. Whether you want to imagine the reincarnation of John Lennon or Kurt Cobain, write a powerful family poem responding to a photograph or home movie, or a poem based on a Constable print owned by a relative, this course will give you a wide range of strategies to layer your poems excitingly with the power of all those other makers.