John McCollughPoetry Workshop with John McCullough

Thursday 13 June 2013 @ Heene Gallery, Worthing

John McCullough will be leading a poetry workshop. His first collection of poems was The Frost Fairs (Salt, 2011). It was a holiday read in The Observer and was a Book of the Year for The Independent and The Poetry School and subsequently won the Polari First Book Prize. John's poems shift between characters in the present and those in both WWII and the nineteenth century and he employs the coastline of Sussex in his work. He is a keen twitcher and lives in Hove.

“In the workshop, I will cover different ways of surprising a reader.  We'll consider how to do this at the level of language through the collisions of different registers of language (e.g. scientific words rubbing up against religious ones or slang), and through unexpected noun-verb combinations.  We'll also think about how to exploit changes of direction in poems, and discuss how to resist over explaining.  Through a final exercise, I'll encourage people to begin a poem from only a very loose undercurrent of logic rather than a tight argument.”