Contemporary
Poetry
Workshops
with
Mary Jean Chan
Michaelmas 2023
Thursdays, 2-5pm
Judith E Wilson Drama Studio
Faculty of English, West Road CB3 9DP
In this seven-week workshop series, Faber poet and 2023-24 Judith E Wilson Poetry Fellow Mary Jean Chan will be offering a Contemporary Poetry Workshop which will introduce you to some of the most exciting voices in contemporary Anglophone poetry, including Chen Chen, Kei Miller, Valzhyna Mort, Layli Long Soldier, Emily Berry, Natalie Diaz and others.
Through readings, discussions and in-class writing exercises, you will get the chance to produce new poems, as well as receive peer and tutor feedback on work-in-progress.
Students will be required to do some light reading before each workshop, and to participate in paired-/groupwork in a seminar-style format. There will be writing tasks assigned each week (to be workshopped in the following week), so this course would work best if students committed to attending the workshops on a regular basis.
Learning outcomes
Upon completing the workshops, participants will:
1) have developed their understanding of a range of poetic forms (e.g. the lyric, the prose poem, the sestina and more)
2) be given peer critique and tutor feedback to produce new poetry, and to hone their work-in-progress
3) have gained a deeper knowledge of how to collate and publish their work, either as pamphlets, or as full collections
Course content
Week 2 / 12 October: Poetry and its Possibilities
Week 3 / 19 October: The Lyric
Week 4 / 26 October: Persona Poetry
Week 5 / 2 November: Prose Poetry
Week 6 / 9 November: Elegiac Writing
Week 7 / 16 November: The Sestina, the Sonnet and the Specular Poem
Week 8 / 23 November: Towards a Poetry Pamphlet / Collection
To sign up, and for more information: please contact Mary Jean Chan at mjc242@cam.ac.uk
Number of places available: 30 (this course is now full and has closed for registration). Thanks!
Mary Jean Chan is the author of the poetry collection Flèche, published by Faber & Faber (2019). Flèche won the Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize. Chan’s second book, Bright Fear, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and is shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Chan edited the anthology 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022) with Andrew McMillan and is a judge for the 2023 Booker Prize.
