Ars Poetica: The Art of Poetry with Adam Wyeth

Course Summary

Ars Poetica: The Art of Poetry and the Metaphorical Landscape is a one-day seminar designed to immerse participants in the living force of poetry. Led by award-winning poet Adam Wyeth, this unique workshop explores poetry not just as a literary form but as a way of perceiving and inhabiting the world. Drawing on classic and contemporary voices from Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney, Tomas Tranströmer, Anne Carson, and Vona Grourke and many more – the day weaves together talk, close reading, and creative exercises. Poetry will be approached as alchemy and metamorphosis – a medium that can transform the ordinary into the luminous. This is not simply a class on writing poems; it is an initiation into poetry as an imaginative state of being.

There will be a one-hour break for lunch.

Course Outline

We will explore different forms of ars poetica – poems about poetry itself – from Shakespeare’s sonnets to Heaney’s work.

From there, the workshop moves into the symbolic and metaphorical power of image, examining how poets like Dickinson and Tranströmer open windows into the unconscious. Speed writing and automatic exercises will unlock the creative channel, followed by guided editing sessions on shaping raw language into crafted verse.

We will also look at poetry as portal, alchemy and metamorphosis, discovering how language acts as a threshold into deeper ways of seeing.

Adam has designed a series of fun and accessible exercises around these themes, leading up to an invitation for participants to create their own ars poetica — a poem personal to their relationship with poetry.

There will be no pressure on anyone to share their work unless they wish to.

Personal Statement from Adam Wyeth

Over the years, I have come to work closely with the idea of poetry as image, and as a portal into imaginative landscapes that unlock the deeper layers of our world. For me, poetry is a way of seeing. Carl Jung said that “image is psyche,” and if I were to distill poetry into a single word, it would be image. Poetry is language within language, a heightened mode of speech where metaphor springs directly from image. I believe that all good poems are, in some way, about poetry itself – about language turning back on itself to reveal its own mystery. As Ibsen wrote, “to be a poet is chiefly to see,” a truth that resonates deeply with the Irish word for poet, file, which means seer. Poetry is therefore both vision and invocation: a way of perceiving what lies hidden, and of giving it form in language.

Biography

Adam Wyeth is an award-winning and critically acclaimed poet, playwright and essayist with five books published with Salmon Poetry. In 2019 he received The Kavanagh Fellowship Award. He is the author of Silent Music, Highly Commended by the Forward Poetry Prize and The Art of Dying, an Irish Times Book of the Year. In 2013 Salmon Poetry published his book of essays, The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic Mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry, Foreword by Paula Meehan. This book is used as a teaching tool around the world and has been officially added to DeSales University (Pennsylvania) MFA program in Creative Writing and DePaul University classes in Chicago – Books for Celtic Mythology and Books for Contemporary Celtic Literature. Wyeth’s plays have been performed across Ireland and also in New York and Berlin. His play This Is What Happened was published by Salmon in 2019. His fifth collection about:blank is a large four-part poetical sequence, which blurs genre, moving across, poetry, prose and dialogue. In 2020, Wyeth was selected for The Abbey Theatre’s (Ireland’s National Theatre) Engine Room Development Programme where he worked on about:blank as an audio-immersive piece. Subsequently, he received the Arts Council Ireland Literature Project Award to complete the project. about:blank premiered at Dublin Theatre Festival 2021. Wyeth is also a recipient of the Live Music & Performance Scheme for a new music and text work in collaboration with Emmy-nominated composer David Downes, called there will be no silence. It premiered at the National Concert Hall, 2024; released by Diatribe records. Adam teaches online creative writing correspondence courses at adamwyeth.com and Fishpublishing.com.