As the sharp-eyed among you will notice, the Upcoming Workshops list has gone. That's because the funding for Community Education at CPIT was ‘reviewed’, and cut by 50%. As a result, the ACE department was disbanded at the end of 2010, and so my poetry courses no longer have a home. On the plus side …
Cinquains – for pleasure and profit
Ok, maybe not the profit part. But Wednesday was the first session of the POET105: Jump-Starting the Muse poetry workshop at CPIT, and one of the challenges I gave them was the cinquain. Like haiku, it's a form that most people get taught a fairly dodgey version of while at school. (Personally I blame maths: …
Courses for CPIT Term Three
As you may have noticed, I've put up the list of poetry courses for next term at CPIT. There are three on offer, and the blurbs are below. Clicking on this link will take you to the downloadable enrollment form. If you are interested in attending one, PLEASE don't leave it until the last minute to enroll. …
When Teaching Goes ______ (it goes, it goes, it just goes?)
That's two sessions of 2nd-term Reading for Writing. An good group, and interesting – four of the eight present this time were persons of the male persuasion, which is something of a record. I'm not going to draw any conclusions about the effect of the course subtitle (‘American Women’), but … The frustrating thing is …
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Subverting Clichés – an axe to grind
One of the exercises I gave my CPIT students recently was the classic "reanimating clichés" (i.e. take a cliché and treat it as though literally true. Explore it. Give it life again). I've always enjoyed it, and have managed to get a couple of perfectly acceptable poems from it in the past. One (light) poem …
A Dark Feathered Art 