Notes on Memory: Poetry with Rishi Dastidar

Course Summary

Making sense of, and use of, our memories, is a key we that we as poets can generate new material. Join Rishi Dastidar for a workshop filled with simple exercises designed to get you paying attention to thoughts, feelings, and details from your life you might have overlooked. All of which will help refresh your approach to writing poems.

Course Outline

Inspired by Joe Brainard’s innovative memoir ‘I remember’, the workshop asks participants to dive into memories from different parts of their lives, and see what poetry might emerge from them. Framed through different devices (time, places, ghosts, and conversations), it allows participants to access different emotions, and ideas that can be translated into poems.

Course Outcomes

Participants should hopefully generate plenty of material that can go into new drafts of poems. Recent participants in workshops have written new work, as well as having their approach to writing poetry reinvigorated.

A poem from Rishi Dastidar’s Laurel Prize long-listed third collection, Neptune’s Projects (Nine Arches Press), was included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2024. He is editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century (Nine Arches Press), and co-editor of Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (Corsair). He also reviews poetry for The Guardian (UK) and is chair of international contemporary writing magazine Wasafiri.

Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email info@irishwriterscentre.ie.