Notes on Memory: Poetry with Rishi Dastidar

Course Summary

Making sense of, and using, our memories, is a tool poets can use to generate work. Join Rishi Dastidar for a course 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 you generate drafts of new poems.

Course Outline

Inspired by Joe Brainard’s innovative memoir ‘I remember’, and using specific prompts, the course will ask participants to dive into memories from different parts of their lives, and see what poetry might emerge from them. Every session is designed to be generative, and encourage lots of writing.

Session 1: Matters of time

We’ll think about how we perceive time, how that changes through our life, and what that means for what we remember and how.

Session 2: Landscapes of remembering

Places – homes, offices, school, as well as cities and nature – are encoded with memories when we know how to look at them.

Session 3: A sense of nostalgia

We’ll consider how tastes, smells, touches. sounds and music – and the sensations that come with them – are triggers for memories.

Session 4: Histories, big and small

Our memories are not just made of what happens to us, but also how we relate to wider societies and communities around us. We’ll think about how that can inspire poems.

Session 5: Conversation with ghosts

In this session we’ll examine how people who have left our lives, as well as who we were when younger, can be fuel for poems.

Session 6: Memory palaces

Inspired by a technique to improve how you remember things, we’ll think about how unexpected juxtapositions can power poems.

Course Outcomes

By the end of our sessions you’ll have an understanding and appreciation of how memory is intimately connected to the act of creation, and how surprising connections are the lifeblood of art making, especially in poems. You’ll have your approach to writing poetry reinvigorated, and also a whole stack of early drafts of poems, ready to be further worked on in preparation for sending out to magazines.

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.