with Kim Moore, Jacqueline Saphra, Roy McFarlane and John McCullough
1st-4th February 2022
To book, please ring Rydal Hall on 015394 32050
£420 single room
Includes accommodation, breakfast, lunch, three-course evening meal and all workshops and readings
During the Poetry Carousel, each participant will take part in a two hour workshop with each tutor. In the evenings there will be poetry readings from the tutors and invited guest poets. Workshop groups will be limited to a maximum of ten participants, creating an intimate atmosphere in the workshops, and a festival atmosphere in the evening, when we come together for dinner and readings. The four tutors are Kim Moore, Hannah Lowe, John McCullough and Roy McFarlane. A guest poet will join us mid-week and details of workshops will be announced soon.
Tutor Biographies
Jacqueline Saphra is a poet, playwright and teacher. Recent collections are All My Mad Mothers, shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot prize and Dad, Remember You are Dead (2019), both from Nine Arches Press. A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller (2017) and Veritas: Poems after Artemisia (2020) were published by Hercules Editions. Her most recent play, The Noises was nominated for a Standing Ovation Award. One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets was published by Nine Arches Press in 2021. She is a founder member of Poets for the Planet and teaches and mentors for The Poetry School.
John McCullough lives in Hove. His third book of poems Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins, 2019) won the Hawthornden Prize and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. John’s previous collections have been Books of the Year for publications including The Guardian and The Independent, and he also won the Polari First Book Prize. Most recently, his poem ‘Flower of Sulphur’ was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. He teaches creative writing at the University of Brighton and for organizations including the Arvon Foundation. His fourth collection, Panic Response will be published in Spring 2022 with Penned in the Margins.
Roy McFarlane is a Poet, Playwright and former Youth & Community Worker born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage, former Birmingham Poet Laureate, Starbuck Poet in Residence and presently Birmingham & Midlands Institute Resident Poet. His debut collection, Beginning With Your Last Breath, was followed by The Healing Next Time, (Nine Arches Press 2018) nominated for the Ted Hughes award and Jhalak Prize. Jazzed to the bone and can be found in Brighton working on his third collection coming out Autumn 2022.
Kim Moore’s pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves was a winner in the 2011 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition. Her first collection The Art of Falling (Seren 2015) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second collection All The Men I Never Married was published by Seren in 2021. Her first non-fiction book What The Trumpet Taught Me will be published by Smith/Doorstop in March 2022.
Guest Poet: To Be Announced
Workshops
On Love and Protest
Jacqueline Saphra
How do we balance rage and righteousness with love and joy? How might we write poems of protest but not give in to despair? We will pose these questions and investigate polarities in ourselves and in the world as we engage with the poetic challenges of these times. We’ll read, analyse and experience the craft of some of the greats to see what we might learn from them and let them inspire us towards the making of our own new poems.
What’s Going On: Allowing words to riff off the page
Roy McFarlane
We’ll be looking at how music can provide the space and the freedom to address the vagaries of personal and public histories. Working with themes and worlds that will interweave and live side-by-side in the same writing. Syncopated emotions resounding and threading through the narrative.
Not only will we create an environment to lyrically flow and write but we’ll be sharing personal journeys that are caught up or affected by the moment or tied to the past and the present. Exploring the work of Lynda Hull and Marvin Gaye both lyrical and harrowing, both challenging and drawing the reader into an act of participation.
Reimagining the Line
John McCullough
A vital part of creativity is being open to a change in direction. Moving away from older plans into fresh territory that emerges both through research but during writing itself is also one of the most exciting parts of being a poet. With that in mind, this session will focus on surprise and taking risks. John will talk about searching for new influences for collections as well as taking risks with form, technique and subject matter. We’ll touch on making private anthologies and scrapbooks and how you can gather useful observations from writing in different places and asking questions of images, phrases, memories and odd facts that intrigue you. Exercises will push you to explore unfamiliar avenues and play with a broad array of possibilities with perspective, the line and the stanza.
Playing around with Pronouns
Kim Moore
During this workshop we will be experimenting with pronouns. We will look at poems that use the collective ‘we’, poems that avoid any use of pronoun altogether, poems that use the personal ‘I’ or the more general ‘you’. We’ll examine the impact that these techniques have on the reader and then have a go at writing our own poems that play fast and loose with pronouns.
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