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Workshop

The Big Idea: Building The Sonnet Sequence

A workshop focusing on sonnets and sonnet sequences, both conventional and unconventional.

Participants will spend some time reading conventional and less conventional takes on the single sonnet before moving on to sequences, crowns and heroic crowns of sonnets. They’ll consider modern sequences from poets like George Meredith, Marilyn Hacker, George Szirtes and Patricia Smith. The sonnet sequence provides an opportunity to begin to engage with a big idea, one that needs time and space to grow and develop; the trick is in finding the right kind of material to fill such a capacious vessel. In this workshop participants will begin to write their own sequence and go home with the start of a substantial project.

 
John Donne once scathingly claimed ‘The Spanish proverb informs me that he is a fool which cannot make one sonnet and he is mad which makes two’. And yet for English poets from the renaissance onwards the sonnet sequence has continued to hold its appeal. A gift for any poet interested in form, the sonnet sequence is a compulsive and propulsive medium combining the individual sonnet’s properties of integrated thought and feeling with space to develop many-angled exploration, free association and narrative.
Dates and times
10:30 am | Sat 24 Nov 2018
Where
The Poetry School
1 Dock Offices
Canada Water
Surrey Quays Road
SE16 2XU
London
Pricing
£72 | 60+: £68 | concessions: £58