Poetry Grindstone: Sharpening Your Poems

This advanced poetry class will blend reading and discussing work by an array of poets, and writing our own new poems, through prompts and time dedicated to writing. This course will develop your ability to discuss and interpret poetry, as much as your writing of strong, well-assembled and exciting poems.

The first weeks of the class will explore fundamentals of poetry – rhythm, voice, form and rhyme – and as the term proceeds, we will explore a wide array of approaches into poetry, some written in the voice of animals (Frank O’Hara, Fiona Benson, Martina Evans), some that hyper focus on a certain geographical place, (Ciaran Carson, Colette Bryce) and some that speak back to poetic tradition (Terrance Hayes, Claudia Rankine) to ultimately explore how we can innovate in our own work.

This class is for people seriously committed to bettering their poetry as they approach the prospect of publishing their work in magazines and journals.

About the Tutor

Mícheál McCann is a poet from Derry City.

His first collection, Devotion, was Highly Commended in the 2024 Forward Prizes, and listed as a Book of the Year by RTÉ and The Irish Times. His poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review and Banshee, and they have been anthologised in Queering the Green (Lifeboat Press, 2021) and Romance Options: Love Poems for Today (Daedalus Press, 2023). His second collection of poems is forthcoming in 2026.

He has edited Poetry Ireland Review, was the 2024 Publishing Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens and is a poetry critic for The Irish Times. He lives and works in Belfast.