Back to the Future: The Poem as Time Machine with Victoria Kennefick

Course Summary:

Join poet Victoria Kennefick on this poetic odyssey through time and space. We’ll read poems across different eras, from the ancient to the contemporary, and discover how the concept of time and our experience of it have dramatically changed. We’ll explore how the mechanics of poetry echoes this phenomenon and write poems that investigate and reveal our own relationship with time. Expect lively discussion, stimulating poems and a host of generative prompts and creative invitations – the kernels of your future poems.

Course Outline:

Over the 8 weeks we’ll be focusing on how time impacts childhood, family, relationships, the body, the environment, identity, poetic form and language.

Will participants be expected to produce work and if so, how often?

I will provide weekly creative invitations which are optional – they will share these with some of their fellow course participants in breakout rooms.

Course Outcomes:

A deeper understanding of how time as a concept is an integral element of a poem’s formation in terms of theme, form and language. A sense of how our modern experience of time influences how and why we write poetry and what we can learn from earlier poets and their relationship with time. How time impacts our memories and how we process these in poetry, aware that our understanding of them will change as we grow and move through time – which isn’t linear!

Victoria Kennefick’s debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize and the Butler Literary Prize. Her second collection, Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024) was a Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2024 and won the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2025. She was the 2025 Arts Council of Ireland/Trinity College Dublin Writer Fellow.