Upcoming Workshops

Disrupting the Lyric: Complication, Collapse, & Reimagining the Voice  @ The Poetry School

Explore what happens when the lyric voice is put under pressure, when voice becomes unstable, or fragmentary.

What happens when the lyric “I” cannot sustain itself? When a poem refuses to move smoothly from feeling to resolution, and instead comes apart, rejects a traditional narrative arc, or begins again? What emerges when coherence gives way, when voice becomes unstable, provisional, or no longer holds a single, unified position?  

This one-off workshop explores poems in which the lyric voice is placed under pressure: interrupted by competing narratives, temporal shifts, or destabilising turns in thought. With texts by Terrance Hayes, Kim Addonizio, Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, and Jennifer Lee Tsai, we will encounter voices that pivot mid-scene, poems that revise their own terms, and work that shifts between registers within the same poem, moving from narrative to abstraction, from direct address to philosophical reflection, often mid-thought or mid-line, unsettling the sense that the poem is guided by a single, continuous voice.   

Together, we will examine how these pressures manifest in the poem: where language strains, where a voice splits or recasts itself, and where the poem resists its own forward movement. Through focused prompts, participants will generate new work, exploring how interruption can become generative, producing tension, instability, and unexpected forms of meaning. We will also consider how structure itself, through fragmentation, repetition, or abrupt formal shifts, can enact these dynamics, allowing the poem to think in real time.  

1-off Zoom session at 6.30–9pm(BST on Monday 7th September)

Book here