Back by popular demand, Fourteen Poems offer four new poets to lead on an exciting new round of poetry workshops:
10.05.2023 | 6.30 -8.30 PM
WRITE POETRY, WRITE HISTORY / with Ellora Sutton
History – or the way it is presented, taught, curated – is full of silences, especially around queer people. History has a tendency to put queerness in parentheses, but as the American poet Chen Chen says: “Poems are a space where the parentheticals can speak at full volume.” Using examples from poets like J. Jennifer Espinoza and Hera Lindsay Bird, we’ll think about poetry as a means of talking back to, taking inspiration from, and queering history in its various different forms.
Ellora Sutton, she/her, is a poet and museum person based in Hampshire. Her work has been published in The Poetry Review, bath magg, Popshot, and The North, amongst others, and she reviews poetry for Mslexia. Her pamphlet Antonyms for Burial was published in October 2022 by Fourteen Poems, and is the Poetry Book Society Spring 2023 Pamphlet Choice. Her next pamphlet, Artisanal Slush, is due September 2023 from Verve.
17.05.2023 | 6.30 -8.30 PM
THE EYE MUST TRAVEL / with David McGovern
The workshop will explore the interplay between poetry and visual art. How does your poem appear on the page? Do you wish to include images in your collection, like in the work of Claudia Rankine or Jay Bernard? What other techniques exist to offer the reader a bold and striking experience?
Later in the session we explore how poems might be translated into visual art, with a focus on video art. With both disciplines we are trying to determine timing, establish rhythm and control pace. Participants will be guided through a process that translates their poem into a piece of experimental moving image.
*Note to participants*
Please bring your phone / tablet in order to capture images. If you don't have a smartphone please let us know in advance.
David McGovern is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and educator based between Dublin and London. He works with moving image, audio, performance and text to create space for self-enquiry, reflection and speculation. He is currently developing HARDCARE; a participatory artwork exploring unconventional and deviant care experiences through queer and cyberfeminist lenses. David received the Irish Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award in 2022. His poetry has been published in The Stinging Fly and has screened his video work in London, Paris and Tokyo.
24.05.2023 | 6.30 -8.30 PM
IN-BETWEENNESS / with Helen Bowell
What if you don’t fit in the categories people put you in? What if your identity shifts from day to day? Where is safe if you never truly belong anywhere? Taking inspiration from the fourteen poems Bi+ Lines project, this workshop will explore ideas of in-betweenness. We will think about sexuality, gender, race, migration, class, disability and our other identities, finding the creativity in the unique perspective that in-betweenness gives us.
Helen Bowell is a bisexual poet based in London. Her debut pamphlet The Barman was published by Bad Betty Press in January 2022 and was selected by the Poetry Book Society as their Summer 2022 Pamphlet Choice. Helen is a Ledbury Poetry Critic and an alumna of The Writing Squad, Roundhouse Poetry Collective and the London Library Emerging Writers programme.
31.05.2023 | 6.30 -8.30 PM
PLAICE IN POEMS / with Jaime Lock
We all come from somewhere. Lots of us carry the love, weight, comfort, discomfort, joy, pain of our home places with us into our writing. We carry its people, its food, its weather. What does ‘place’ mean in our work? How does where we come from influence who we are as writers? How can we locate our poems, drawing on places we know deeply? How can we queer these places into newness? We’ll explore these questions through writing exercises and learning from existing queer place poems to begin weaving our personal understandings and feelings of place into our poems.
Jaime Lock is a poet and creative facilitator from the Isles of Scilly, a small archipelago 28 miles off the coast of Cornwall, now based in London. They have poems in Impossible Archetype, Signal House Edition, fourteen poems and the anthology Cornish Modern Poetries by Broken Sleep Books, among others. Jaime’s audio piece, On the Rock, about growing up on Scilly, was commissioned as part of BBC New Creatives. They were part of Apples and Snakes’ Writers’ Room in 2021 and Down Stage Write’s ‘Write Out Loud’ cohort, developing LGBTQ+ stories for stage. Jaime is working on their debut poetry pamphlet. They quite like fish puns.