Immersed in Verse with Enda Coyle-Greene

Course Summary:

Poems don’t exist in a vacuum. A good poem is timeless. Over a period of six relaxed Saturday mornings, stop all the clocks in a room filled with poets, poetry and poems: your own in the making, which will be workshopped and discussed, as well those shining examples from the canon and elsewhere that give us comfort and hope, to be chosen by the facilitator and participants in turn. We’ll also explore the very nature of poetry: where poems come from and where a successful poem needs to go.

Course Outline

Every week, the facilitator and two participants in turn will each bring along a quote or short piece of writing about poetry or the behind-the-lines thoughts of poets as well as a poem they admire, written by anyone they choose, to share with the room.  All poems written by the group will be workshopped and new ideas generated.   A prompt will be suggested by the facilitator at the end of class each week for any participants who would like one.

Course Outcomes:

By the conclusion of the course, each participant will feel more fully immersed in their craft, part of that on-going ‘standing army of poets’, as described by Patrick Kavanagh, and inspired enough to have produced and/or started new poems of their own.

Enda Coyle-Greene’s debut collection, Snow Negatives won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2006 and was published by the Dedalus Press in 2007. Her subsequent collections are Map of the Last (2013) and Indigo, Electric, Baby (2020) both also from Dedalus. Co-founder and Artistic Director of the Fingal Poetry Festival, Enda holds an MA (Dist.) in English, Creative Writing from the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. She was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in 2020.