Reading & Writing Poetry: Language as Material

Guided by Kenneth Goldsmith’s 2011 essay Language as Material, this 10-week course has been designed for those with some experience of reading and writing poetry.

In addition to developing critical discourse, participants will explore the “poem’s reality as structure and material” along with precedents of conceptual poetry that “run deep in 20^th century modernism.”

Participants will also explore, by way of close reading and their own experiment, the ways which, according to Goldsmith, like “John Cage who said that music is all around us if only we had ears to hear it … poetry is all around us, if only we [have] the eyes to see it.”

About the tutor

Natasha Cuddington was born in Saskatchewan, Canada and holds a BA in Creative Writing and English Literature and an MA in Irish Studies. A writing facilitator with experience in a variety of contexts, her translations, poetry, essays and reviews have appeared variously on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 2017, she was announced as the recipient of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary. Her début poetry collection, Each of us (our chronic alphabets) was published by Arlen House (2018). With Ruth Carr, she co-edited Her Other Language: Northern Irish Women Writers Address Domestic Violence and Abuse (Arlen House, 2020).