Appreciating contemporary poetry

Course details

T S Eliot while speaking of the “buried life” of his poetry had mentioned the various occluded selves which he explored in his writing – the hidden motives, the previous incarnations and the power of the irrational. This workshop will untangle some of this “buried life” of contemporary poetry.

The workshop will equip participants with the necessary tools for appreciating and writing contemporary poetry. It will cast some light on how cotemporary poetry, along with the classic themes of pain, loss, beauty, love which have long dominated the world of art, straddles recognisable issues of contemporary interest (war, terrorism, environmentalism and globalisation etc).

Aims

• A basic understanding of the sense, structure and recurrent themes present in contemporary poetry
• Where it all started – T S Eliot and The Waste Land (1922), the intellectual process of his creativity and the concept of objective correlative
• Analysing an important strand of modernism, Ezra Pound and the concept of Imagism, the need to express in precise visual images without excess verbiage
• An introduction to the submarine world of myth, mysticism and alchemy in Ted Hughes’s poetry
• Why did the caged bird sing? Looking at the presence of contemporary issues in Maya Angelou’s poetry
• A practical session of writing contemporary poetry
• Critique and reflection on the experience