The Poetry School’s New Onilne Course: Caribbean Poetry with Dorothea Smartt
Caribbean Poetry, taught by poet Dorothea Smartt, gives poetry readers and writers of all ages, styles, backgrounds and interests an introduction to the most important voices in Caribbean poetry.
Taught within a dedicated, private website, the course runs once a fortnight for 5 sessions from the end of January, and is open to anyone in the world with a desire to take part and a reliable broadband connection.
Here’s how Poetry School Online courses work…
Courses take place within their own special website, a custom-built virtual learning environment and follow the same pattern. Students post or circulate poems or writing exercise results in advance of a two hour live chat session which takes place online at a set time during the fortnight. During the chat session, the tutor and your fellow students post responses to the circulated work in a free-flowing live-typed discussion.
Each live chat, including the comments on your work, will be archived on the website for you to revisit at your convenience. There is also a forum on the website for you to talk to your fellow students in between live chats.
A more detailed guide on how to participate will be provided when you enrol, but please note that online courses are recommended for those who are already comfortable in an online environment as we will only be able to offer limited technical support to students. You will need to have easy access to the internet via a broadband connection.
Caribbean Poetry: reading and writing ideas
Day / Time: Thursdays fortnightly, 7-9pm
Duration: 5 sessions
Start date: 27 January
Price: £64, £50 (60+), £42 (concs)
Level: open to all
Dorothea brings together a course which introduces you to the most important voices in Caribbean poetry. We’ll re/discover and appreciate titles from Peepal Tree Press, the Leeds-based international publisher celebrating 25 years as the ‘home of the best in Caribbean writing’.
With Kwame Dawes (JA); Donna Weir-Soley (JA); Anthony Kellman (B;dos); Merle Collins (Greneda) and Marion Bethel (Bahamas) as our guides we’ll explore what poet Kamau Braithwaite calls ‘Nation Language’, and something of the “grounding of Caribbean aesthetics in a Caribbean cosmology which draws from other ancestors than Europe… with an emphasis on the sacred in the midst of life…[and] as much emphasis on the rhythmic body as the word’, and respond to our reading with poems of our own.