A series of seven classes, delivered weekly from April 22 to June 3, by members of the North Sea Poets: Kathleen Jamie, Niall Campbell, Karen Solie, Don Paterson, Lisa Brockwell, John Glenday, and Leslie Harrison.

– Classes will run between 90 minutes and two hours long, and students will have an opportunity to interact with the tutor through a Q&A at the end of the session. All class times are BST (British Summer Time).
– This series is suitable for both experienced and emerging writers.
– Your ticket gives you access to all seven classes. Cost: £250
– Please visit the website for information about the series, and for details about additional single webinars, workshops, and masterclasses.

Week 1: 22nd April 2025 7:30-9:30pm
Don Paterson: What’s a Poem Anyway?

This introductory workshop will take a deep breath then a deeper dive into a place that poets often leave curiously unexplored: what is a poem, anyway? In this class, Don will look at not just the historical, cultural and psychological roots of the poem as a verbal artefact, but how the meaning of the word ‘poet’ has changed over the millennia, together with the poet’s role in the culture at large. He’ll then turn to the present to ask what poets might be for today: why do some of us still have the urge to do this strange thing with language, even in our age of dramatic technological and cultural change? And how can we do it most effectively?

Week 2: 29th April 2025 7:30-9:30pm
Niall Campbell: The Point of the Mask is Not the Mask

Charles Wright in his poem ‘Chickamauga’ writes: ‘The point of the mask is not the mask but the face underneath.’ The mask, in its own way, can be revealing. This workshop will begin by looking at how different poets (including Seamus Heaney, Liz Berry, Ted Hughes and others) have adopted different personae to create distance from the ‘usual’ author of their own work. Later, in generative exercises, we will also put on voices and masks to test how far we can step away from ourselves – and discover how, in being someone different, we might sometimes speak more truly.

Week 3: 6th May 2025 7:30-9:30pm
Karen Solie: ‘I Can’t Tell You What I Mean’: Writing Uncertainty​​

Language is a system for conveying meaning. But how might we begin to address experiences and ideas whose meanings, even to us, are less than clear? How might we, as poets, use language to express that uncertainty? How might our poems generate uncertainty as a meaningful experience for the reader? In this session, Karen will look at poems by several contemporary poets that suggest practical strategies for writing uncertainty, and writing by poets who offer ways to consider, as Fanny Howe does, ‘bewilderment as a poetics and an ethics.’ The class will also undertake a brief writing experiment, which might uncover the seed of a new poem.

Week 4: 13th May 2025 7:30-9:30pm
Lisa Brockwell: Reading to Write

Your lifelong apprenticeship to poetry starts with your internal library. The quickest way to write a half decent poem is to read a thousand great ones. To get there, you need to battle your way through many, many thousands of mediocre poems. The trick is to know the difference. That takes a lot of practice: it’s a long apprenticeship to become someone who can write a poem that a stranger might want to read. As well as talent, a good ear, humility and a sense of vocation – a poet has a living and growing anthology inside them, whispering to you during your waking and sleeping hours. Once built, this internal library will stay with you for life, growing, transforming, bedding in, living a life of its own. In this workshop, Lisa will provide a toolbox to help you build it – whether you’re starting out with plans for a Grand Designs-style new build or doing a refurb on something old and derelict.

Week 5: 20th May 2025 7:30-9:30pm
John Glenday: Behind. Before. Above. Between. Below.

In this online antidote to the empty page, John will explore the hinterland of the imagination, using Donne’s five dimensions of desire as a template. Where should we look, and what tools can we use to avoid the dreaded Writer’s Block? How should we adapt our process so that we’re always open to the creative worlds around and within us? Through discussion, examples and quickfire exercises, we’ll lay the foundations of new work and discover strategies for revitalising our ailing drafts. Every poem we write is our first poem.

Week 6: 27th May 2025 7:30-9:30pm
Lesley Harrison: Writing Home​​​

Drawing on work from several contemporary poets, this session will examine ways in which we map ourselves onto a landscape.  Is ‘home’ always that place we define and complete? Is this inevitable? In this session Lesley will discuss the process of writing from here, wherever ‘here’ is, and how we might question the whole notion of a ‘firm footing’. Are there ‘homes’ and ‘heres’ into which we might also project our imaginations and alternative futures? (‘Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it.’ – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space)

Week 7: 3rd June 2025 7:30-9:30pm
Kathleen Jamie: The Joy of Drafting

Using a new poem of her own, complete with all its drafts, Kathleen will demonstrate the process of writing a poem from start to finish. Beginning with the initial idea, she’ll ask – what is inspiration, anyway? Then follows the crucial back-of-an-envelope first draft, and after that, the absorbing task of re-writing and re-writing, listening and thinking, as poet and poem work together to achieve a finished form. Your own practice and voice will develop as you discover the skills required at each stage of this poetic process, with all its frustrations and rewards.