Join my new 10-week course and write bold new poems from visual art

10-weeks, online from wherever you are in the world, starting 8th October 2026

Hello lovely reader,

I’m popping into your inbox today to share an upcoming opportunity for us to write together. You’re invited to join my new ten-week course, coming this autumn!

The course is called “Beyond Ekphrasis: Encounters with Poetry and Visual Art” and it runs online from 8th October via the Poetry School. *(see Ekphrasis below)

In the course, we’ll look closer at the act of looking, consider how we position ourselves in relation to a work of art, and test out a range of experimental techniques.

I’ll be sharing the toolbox of approaches that helped me to write my third book, peel me Watcher, published by Guillemot Press in 2025.

The course is online and asynchronous, meaning that you can take part from wherever you are in the world. The Poetry School are brilliant about keeping their courses affordable, and there are concessions available too.

Spaces are limited to a small group to optimise peer and 1:1 feedback from me, so don’t leave it too late to book. I hope you can join us!

Course details

What happens when we encounter a work of art? How do poems emerge from acts of looking, misremembering, interpreting, questioning, desiring, or resisting? In this course, we’ll explore the rich territory where poetry and visual art meet, moving beyond traditional ekphrasis to experiment with a range of creative responses to images, objects, exhibitions, and encounters with art.

Across five assignments, we’ll write with, through, alongside, and against visual art. Through approaches including description, personification, address, catalogues and captions, we’ll explore how poems can enter into dialogue with artworks and the worlds that surround them. Along the way, we’ll ask not only what we see when we look at art, but who is looking, from where, and under what conditions.

Drawing inspiration from experimental poets and artists including Lucy Mercer, Jean-Luc Champerret, Astra Papachristodoulou, Henri Matisse, Jamie Crewe and others, we’ll develop new strategies for looking, making connections, and generating poems from visual experience. We’ll also briefly consider examples of visual and concrete poetry, and artworks that use text as material, as a way of expanding our sense of what these exchanges can look like. By the end of the course, you’ll have a toolkit of techniques for engaging imaginatively with artworks, exhibitions, objects, and visual culture.

5 fortnightly sessions over 10 weeks, starting 8 October 2026. No live chats. Suitable for UK & International students.

*A note on ekphrasis

Ekphrasis is describing or translating a work of art from one medium (e.g. painting) into another (e.g. writing). There’s a really good explanation of it here. I take an experimental approach and we’ll go much wider than this conventional definition during the course.