Risky Business: Writing ‘Brave’ Poems Outside Your Comfort Zone with Victoria Kennefick

Course Summary:

Writing poetry is an undeniably risky business for both poet and reader yet is an essential element of any great poem. This course explores and interrogates the edges of risk by facilitating the creation of new work that says something bold and new while also taking adventurous leaps with form and language. What is at stake when writing a poem that invites the reader into a vulnerable space? How do we construct a poem that contains difficult emotions and experiences? How do we, as poets, paradoxically stay safe and brave when writing into risk? Take the leap with this course and broaden your poetic horizons.

Course Outline:

Are you ready to think about concepts of bravery in relation to reading and to poetry? What is a brave poem?

In this workshop participants will be encouraged to explore unknown poetic territory and step out of their comfort zones to experiment with content, form and technique.

We will read work by Emily Berry, Ocean Vuong, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Christopher Reid, Naomi Shihab Nye, David Clarke, Karen Solie, and Mimi Khalvati among many others as inspiration for our own poems that push past any self-imposed limitations or restrictions.

We will draft portrait poems, found poems, mirror poems, poems about names, historical happenings, ghazals and pantoums.

We will share our own creative practice and inner being through generative exercises, structured feedback and at-home assignments.

Participants will write approximately 2-3 new poems in each workshop and have the opportunity to re-draft one of these for the following week.

The course will end with an online reading of the participants work.

Course Outcomes:

Participants will finish the course with a batch of fresh-off-the-press poems that cohere around the concept of risk and bravery. They will also have an archive of drafts and extra prompts to continue exploring this topic beyond the confines of the course schedule. They will also have the experience of reading their work aloud in an online reading of participants’ poetry.

Victoria Kennefick is a writer, poet, editor and teacher. Her 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 for Poetry 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 is the 2025 Arts Council of Ireland/Trinity College Dublin Writer Fellow.