Taking the Fear Out of Form with Enda Coyle Greene
Info
Date: October 7, 2025
Time: 6.30 pm – 8.30 pm
Duration: 6 weeks
Level: Intermediate |
Cost: €190 (€171 Members)
Location: Online
This course will take place online on Tuesdays (six sessions in total).
Find further information on our building access here.
Course Summary
The course will use examples of iconic poems from the canon to explore the sonnet, the sestina, the villanelle, and other poetic forms, and will also examine rhyme, the stanza, and the centrality of the line to any poem. The course is aimed at writers of poetry who want to take their poetic skills to another, deeper level.
The course will take place online over six weeks.
Course Outline
Over six weeks, the traditional poetic forms will be explored with each session concentrating on at least one form. The focus will be on participants acquiring a deeper knowledge of the skills and techniques involved in that particular form.
As the course is aimed at Intermediate level, pre-screening of work will not be necessary. Work will not be requested in advance of the course beginning.
Participants will be asked to produce or attempt to produce a poem of their own, which will be read and discussed in class with advice and feedback from both the tutor and other participants.
Over the six weeks of the course, the tutor will recommend poems and poetry books for the participants.
Course Outcomes
The outcome of the course will be that each participant will come away with a relaxed but clear understanding of how familiarity with poetic form can loosen rather than constrain a poet’s creative instincts. The aim is that each participant will feel more confident about writing in any or all of the traditional poetic forms, thus make it easier for them to embrace the possibilities contained in newer, perhaps self-made shapes and the many different ways in which a poem can be approached.
Enda Coyle-Greene lives in Dublin. Her first collection, Snow Negatives, won the Patrick Kavanagh 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. She holds an MA (Dist.) in Creative Writing from the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. The recipient of a Kavanagh Fellowship in 2020, she is co-founder and Artistic Director of Fingal Poetry Festival.
Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email info@irishwriterscentre.ie.
