Tutors / Menna Elfyn & Paul Henry

This course welcomes new and experienced poets keen to explore how our sense of place, perhaps never so acute at this time of climate crisis, inspires and informs our writing – its diction, imagery, rhythms, and shape on the page. Drawing on the natural environment surrounding Tŷ Newydd – garden and woodland, river, and coastline… we’ll look at how poetry can address global concerns through personal experience and through close observation of the natural world – a leaf’s arid delta, a branch’s love song to the planet…

We’ll also look at how memory can reinvent a place when we write about it, how the past haunts its presence. Through shared reading of work by other poets, daily writing workshops and individual tutorials, we’ll consider the craft and mystery of poetry alongside the creative choices we make between formal and free verse (including the prose poem), full- and half-rhyme, traditional metre, and intuitive rhythm.

Warmly open to English and Welsh speakers alike, this course will help you to move forward in your poetry within a friendly, supportive atmosphere.