Expand Your Poetic Practice with Felicity Plunkett
Presented as part of The Writer’s Process writers’ development program
This intimate online masterclass is devoted to fuelling and boosting your practice as a poet. Its structure interleaves weeks focused on prompts, resources, poems, micro-exercises and a range of poetic forms and aspects of poetic craft, with weeks dedicated to workshopping the poems you develop or rework in the light of these ideas. Each fortnight will explore an idea – attention, expanding the container, tension, loss and gain, and mystery. In the first session each fortnight, Felicity will present a group of prompts, poems and forms built around the fortnight’s idea or motif, and we’ll discuss, explore micro-exercises and draft. Every second week will be for workshopping poems built or shaped by these practices.
Led by award-winning poet and critic Felicity Plunkett, who was Poetry Editor with University of Queensland Press for a decade, our community of reading writers will explore a range of poems and ideas. We’ll build on the collection of set poems and resources through recommendations by Felicity and the other group members in response to participants’ interests and focus.
Each writer will be encouraged to draft new work in response to these readings and short set writing exercises or practices, and to use these ideas as a lens to explore poems already in draft.
This course will be taught by Zoom over a ten-week period, in two-hour blocks from 4-6pm on an agreed weekday and an online space for discussion and sharing of drafts and discussion. The course will commence in the week of 20 March 2023.
The course will also feature a one-hour online Q&A session with guest poet Stuart Barnes.
It will also include a one-on-one editorial conversation with Dr James Jiang, Assistant Editor at Griffith Review, to talk about your current work. Dr Jiang will work with each poet to explore and expand the stylistic range of their habitual practice, drawing out particular elements to pursue further through technical experimentation and programs of reading (critical and creative).
There will be up to eight participants in this class.
PROGRAM OUTLINE
Week 1: Introduction + Attention
Week 2: Attention (workshop)
Week 3: Container
Week 4: Container workshop
Week 5: Tension
Week 6: Tension workshop
Week 7: Loss and Gain
Week 8: Loss and Gain workshop
Week 9: Mystery
Week 10: Mystery workshop
How to Apply
Entry to this course is by application. Writers will be selected based on the creative potential of their work, commitment to craft, openness to collaborating with your peers, and the balance in the group.
Course fees are $1495 or $1345 for Varuna alumni. Payment terms are negotiable if you cannot pay the whole fee upfront. Feel free to call 02 4782 5674 or email amy@varuna.com.au to discuss your application.
Applications closed on 28 February 2023.
Stuart Barnes
About Stuart
Stuart Barnes is the author of two poetry collections: Like to the Lark (Upswell Publishing, 2023) and Glasshouses (UQP, 2016), which won the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize, was commended for the 2016 Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the 2017 Mary Gilmore Award. He has co-judged major poetry prizes and guest co-edited issues of major literary journals. His ’Sestina after B. Carlisle’ won the 2021/22 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. He tweets as @StuartABarnes.
About Felicity
Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. She is the author of A Kinder Sea (UQP), Vanishing Point (UQP) and the chapbook Seastrands (Vagabond) and editor of Thirty Australian Poets (UQP). She is a widely-published writer of reviews, essays and the occasional short story. She has a PhD from the University of Sydney, and was awarded an Excellence in Teaching Award during her years teaching full-time in universities, including the Universities of Sydney, Queensland and New England. She was Poetry Editor with University of Queensland Press and has extensive experience as a mentor and creative editor. She was Chief Examiner of NSW’s HSC English Extension course for five years and also mentors students and teachers. Her latest essay ‘Plath Traps’ is published by Sydney Review of Books.
James Jiang
ABOUT JAMES
James Jiang is a writer, editor and recovering academic based in Meanjin. He is Assistant Editor at Griffith Review and Literary Essays Editor at Cordite Poetry Review. With a special focus on poetry and criticism, his writing has appeared in academic (Modernism/modernity, Cambridge Quarterly) and generalist (Sydney Review of Books, Australian Book Review, Ploughshares) publications in Australia and abroad.
This program is supported by:
