FALLING WITH STYLE/FRANKENSTEINING A POEM/METROPHOBIA with Gregory Kearns

We will look at:

• What are you afraid of?
• Why we should keep moving toward our personal fears in a poem?
• How we stop ourselves drawing back from the poem?
• How our created rules can help?
• How we create and choose the rules that will shape our poems?
• Why might these rules help?

We are going to discuss:

• Existing forms and what affect they have on tone/subject/theme of a poem. And the participants relationships with these existing forms. How writers have experimented with existing forms
• Narrative Structure (Christopher Vogler and John Yorke) – (Symmetry and Asymmetry)
• Stealing ideas and techniques from other art forms: montage (film), layering (visual arts), proportions (visual arts), harmony and dissonance (music)
• The unconscious (what is it?, how it works?, what is our relationship with it is?, how can we use it as poets?) (In this section we’ll touch on the idea that we contain multiple selves, Jung/Campbell’s archetypes) (Active Imagination)
• How and why we create our own forms/rules? (how we use the unconscious to shape these rules?)

You will get a step-by-step process of how to create a content led poetic form. This will include digging down and exploding themes/subjects that are of interest to you. As part of the workshop we will be going through the steps of the process so it is possible that the participants might have a first draft or the frame work for a poem by the end of the session too.

Gregory is a writer based in Liverpool. He has been longlisted for the National Poetry Competition, has been published in Introduction X: The Poetry Business Book of New Poets and has worked with groups like No Dice Collective. Gregory also works for The Brain Charity which supports those affected by neurological conditions. He is a member of the Writing Squad board.