14 Poems May 2024

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Course code: -5907

Fourteen Poems is a London-based poetry journal, publishing the most exciting LGBTQ+ poets 3 times a year.

fees

free

who

QUEERCIRCLE

frances@queercircle.org

What the course is about

Shanay Neusum-James invites you to ‘Find Your Freak’ and will lead us on journeys into the weird, exploring ways to include surprise in a poem by being playful with risk to say things you wouldn't usually say.

Nations themselves are narrations. The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism - Edward Said. 

 

Join Rona Luo for a visual poetry workshop that takes inspiration from the innovative visual forms employed by Terrence Hayes, George Abraham and Monica Ong to blur and fragment the singular narrative of empire, we will explore how visual poetry can make space for multiplicity. By playing with the page as a visual and communal space, we will explore non-linear and interactive possibilities in poetry to create new modes of reading and writing. This low-pressure, experimental workshop is for writers of any level interested in creating new tools outside the traditions of empire.

David, a translator and poet working in several languages, will lead a discussion on how second, third or as-yet-unmastered languages can inform, rather than impede, poetry written in English. Through examples of and in translation, and some exercises and activities on breaking out of the English-language box, the aim of this workshop is to expose the writer's ear to the music, cadence, and capability of second languages to inform poetry written in the first.

How do we understand experience? By what we see, and how we lay significance onto these things. On the other hand, some poets write experience from beyond the poetic, corporeal voice: actually outside of themselves. Writing in this place can lead poems to appreciate their subjects (and poets writing) in radically new ways. Through discussion, a suite of poems, and writing exercises, we’ll come to scrutinise our own experience from outside, so to best render what it is to inhabit ourselves.

Previous experience, knowledge or qualifications

Shanay is a writer and actress based in London. She is an alumna of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, Barbican Young Poets and The Obsidian Foundation. Shanay has been published in Magma, Ambit Magazine, and fourteenpoems journal. Her work explores blackness, childhood and mental health.

Rona Luo is a queer, neurodivergent poet and acupuncturist working at the intersection of decolonial healing and writing as somatic practice. She is a Kundiman fellow, Tin House scholar and member of Southbank Centre's New Poets Collective. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, ANMLY, Honey Literary, Mom Egg Review, fourteen poems, Suspect Journal, and Bi+ Lines anthology. Her speculative visual poetry has been exhibited at London’s Royal Festival Hall.

David Nash was born in County Cork and lives between Ireland and Chile. His work has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, The White Review, Propel, Modern Queer Poets, and the Dedalus anthology Local Wonders, among others. His texts have appeared in numerous art exhibitions and books, including for Wolfgang Tillmans at IMMA. A Spanish-language children’s book, Bajo Mis Pies, came out in 2020, as did two translations of books on the cultural history of Chile. He writes columns for Harpers Bazaar Korea and Elle Korea, and other essays have appeared in The Irish Times.

Michael McCann, 

Mícheál McCann is from Derry, Northern Ireland and the author of the poetry pamphlet Safe Home (Green Bottle Press, 2020). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, Queering the Green, The Manchester Review, Banshee Lit, Ambit, The Tangerine, and The New Frontier: Contemporary Writing From & About the Irish Border.?