In Poetry and Place, Jamie Hale devised and delivered a postal poetry course to isolated and older Lewisham residents early in the pandemic. This course had five modules centred around Lewisham – but there’s no reason why you would have to think about Lewisham when working your way through it – indeed why – and you can now download it for free from us, to try for yourself.
More broadly, the course is about using ‘home’ to explore a range of poetic forms. Poetry & Place is accessible and interesting to people with a wide range of backgrounds. Both people new to writing and experienced writers will all get something from it.
The themes of the packs were:
- Pastoral poetry and places in the past
- Ballads and writing about home
- Haiku and place in the present day
- Acrostics and thinking about home in the future
- Sonnets and what we mean by home
Delivering this by post in a pandemic was a strange time. However, the writers wrote some gorgeous work as part of the project. After it ended, Jamie donated the exercises to writers to work through in their own time, from anywhere. Maybe it will provide an interesting diversion, or an accessible route into thinking about poetic form.
You can download the pack from here
