Poetry and Source: Prompt and Departure with Leeanne Quinn

Course Summary

In this eight-week online course we will consider how we say things in poetry, how we find and adapt our subject matter, how we integrate and depart from our sources. We will discuss in detail how to take inspiration from historical, contemporaneous, ekphrastic, intertextual, and geographical sources.

We will also consider how we incorporate, adapt, and transform our own lives into poetry. Each week we will analyse and discuss a number of exemplary poems, and participants will then be set the task of writing a new poem from a different source. The resulting poems will be shared and workshopped in class the following week.

Course Outline

Week 1:  Engaging with Poetic Source

In this opening session we will begin with an exploration of poetic source and inspiration. From where can we take inspiration for poetry? How can we engage and develop the subject matters that interest us? How do we go about following and transforming these sources into poetry?

Week 2:  Writing Histories

This week we’ll consider the historical poem and look at a number of exemplary poems that engage with history and the historical moment.

Week 3:  The Poem and the Painting

Here we will explore ekphrastic poetry and discuss a range of poems that respond to works of visual art.

Week 4:  Responding to the Present Moment

 How do we respond to the present moment in poetry? How to bear witness to social and political events that shape our world? In Week Four we will consider ideas of response and engagement to the contemporaneous moment.

Week 5: Reading to Write

On the subject of reading literature in order to spark the creative process Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, ‘it is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw’. In Week Five we will consider the necessity of reading others in order to write. We will look at poems and poets who have engaged with other texts and other writers, and consider how we might approach this practice ourselves.

 Week 6. From the City

 In this class we will look at poetry and the city. We will consider poems that have responded to and engaged with ideas of the city and urban landscapes.

Week 7. To the Sea

Here we will move from the city to look at poems that take their inspiration and influence from rural and coastal landscapes.

Week 8. Inventing the Self

In this final class we will challenge the well-known dictum to ‘write what you know’. Is this always the best advice, or does it limit and confine the imagination? Here we will treat the autobiographical self as the prompt but not the destination of the poem.

Course Outcomes

The aim of the course is to encourage participants to seek poetic inspiration from a wide range of sources. To look beyond the limits of the purely personal for inspiration for new poems. Poets will learn how to engage with and depart from a diverse range of source material. In the process participants will study exemplary poems by poets such as Don Mee Choi, Maria Stepanova, Joyelle McSweeney, Sasha Dugdale, Ellen Dillon, Kim Hyesoon, Ilya Kaminsky and Danez Smith. Course participants will work on refining poetic techniques (line, image, diction and sound) through the act of writing new poems that engage with or take inspiration from a different source each week. Participants will also provide and receive constructive criticism through the weekly practice of workshopping each other’s poetry.

Leeanne Quinn is the author of Before You (Dedalus, 2012) and Some Lives (Dedalus, 2020). She co-edited Romance Options: Love Poems for Today (Dedalus, 2022) and, most recently, edited Beginnings Over and Over: Four New Poets from Ireland (Dedalus, 2025). She holds a PhD in American Literature from Trinity College Dublin, and has taught poetry at LMU Munich, and mentored as part of the Dedalus Press Mentoring Scheme. Her third collection of poetry is forthcoming in 2026 with Carcanet Press.

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