Poetry Workshops with Ros Hudis
Below you will find a list of poetry workshops Ros Hudis is offering in 2022. They can be adapted for a range of age-groups, ability and settings from schools, to community groups, to festivals. They can either be taken up individually or as a series. Each individual workshop also has the potential to be extended into a run of workshops building on the same theme.
Ros can also provide customised workshops teaching different craft elements of writing as required, but always in the spirit of enjoyment and accessibility for participants!
Email Ros to discuss requirements and pricing.
Conversing with Poetry
with Ros Hudis
‘when we read something that touches us it’s like a footprint in wet sand that fills with water. The water is our own material’
Kate Clanchy
When we read a poem, we respond not only to the word-object created for us by the poet, but also to the way it fires our own inner world. Shared reading of poems often centres on how they are built and with what techniques. Whilst reading in this way is essential to learning craft, it’s easy to forget that a poem is also an experience — underpinned by how language, form and sound are deployed, but much more than a list of devices. Poems can speak to our lives, trigger memories, associations, stories, emotion, creative ideas of our own. We turn to poems to expand how we see the world, for affirmation and help, for insight, entertainment, transcendence, or simply for the pleasure of finding experience presented to us in compelling and original ways.
In this workshop we will put response before analysis. We will use shared reading to have a conversation with some specially selected poems, sharing whatever feelings, connections or tales they inspire. We will then spend some time exploring how craft elements play into this pool of experience and thought, before individually writing a piece in response to one of the poems explored.
Words Unpacked
with Ros Hudis
‘Words themselves are doors; Janus is to a certain extent their deity, looking back to a ramification of roots and associations and forward to a clarification of sense and meaning’’
Seamus Heaney Feeling into Words
Words are our raw material as poets. They are also mysterious, chameleon, loaded, ambiguous, wondrous and treacherous. Words have a deep past, a chain of meanings some of which have been lost, distorted or transformed, a capacity to mist what we want to say or to bring it into vivid focus. They are sensory, cultural, historical, political, but also deeply personal. We can love certain words, or hate certain words, not only for what they mean, but also for their sound, their shape, their context in our own life-stories. We can use them responsibly, carelessly, creatively. They can harm lives and help them.
This workshop is all about working consciously with the layerness of words. Participants will make a short-list of some words that have a particular resonance for them, positive and negative, then, through games, exercises and conversations, begin journeys into the past and present of their chosen words, asking questions in the process – what words do we resist, what words do we return to and why? What assumptions are we making? We’ll also explore strategies to expand, and experiment with, our own linguistic boundaries.
This workshop can also be focalized around citizenship, diversity, campaign language, or personal empowerment.
Patching Together or How to be Hybrid!
with Ros Hudis
When we restore something we replace it with something else. Sometimes we restore to imitate what was lost, to translate, sometimes to let in the new. Different stories, different objects or ideas sewn onto remnants of the old.
Sometimes we fill the gaps with whatever comes to hand. We make something hybrid, that breaks down the boundaries of culture and time or reassembles them in innovative and surprising ways.
For writers, hybridity has always been a rich source of experiment or creative possibility, a way to challenge conventional narrative and poetics. The American Language poet Susan Howe, famously mixes scraps of archives, letters, photos, found text and lyrics.
In this workshop we will play with different ways of ‘making hybrid’ including found poems and collage, polyphonic structure, and other avant guard strategies, as well as exploring sources of inspiration. We will also think about ‘gaps’ the broken, silent, or incomplete, and how we might want to reclaim such gaps as a dynamic part of the way we communicate that can be made purposeful in literary form.
This workshop can be given as a one off, but is particularly suited to a series.
Journeys into Lost Sound
with Ros Hudis
A highly interactive workshop where participants will explore memories of sounds they no longer hear and pool written responses to create a communal poem of recollection, elegy and celebration.
Lost sound can be from childhood, from a place where we once lived, from disappearing species, from industrial change, from exile ...the list goes on. This can be developed over a number of sessions to include making a sound-track and performance/recording.
Following the Action: verbs that lead the eye and dance the mind
with Ros Hudis
A workshop based on close reading and exercises, where we explore how to use verbs dynamically in poetry to create sonic or visual patterns, provide texture and movement, drive narrative, or invoke 'active' gazing.
Reading and Workshop
with Ros Hudis
A reading from my most recent work followed by a workshop inspired by some of the topics/poetry techniques of the reading.