Poetry: Taking the Fear out of Form with Enda Coyle-Greene

Course Summary:

Using examples of iconic poems chosen from the canon, the course will explore the sonnet, the sestina, the villanelle, and the pantoum, and will examine rhyme, the stanza, and the centrality of the line in relation to the success or failure of any poem.  Over the duration of the course participants will be asked to produce at least two of these forms, which will then be read and discussed by the class.

Course Outcomes:

Participants will come away from the course with a relaxed understanding of the more traditional poetic forms, and how familiarity with these can loosen, rather than constrain a poet’s creative instincts, making it easier perhaps to embrace the possibilities contained in other, newer, self-made shapes.

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.