One of the most influential modes in recent poetry has been the surreal, and for more than half a century many of its finest exponents have been from America. This course starts by looking at the work of three surrealist American masters – Thomas Lux, Charles Simic and James Tate – and the way their blend of outlandish visions, cartoon physics and dream logic can make us laugh and entertain us, but also startle us into new ways of looking at contemporary life.

We will consider the way in which pop culture often intersects with the personal, creating bizarre work with real emotional impact, and we will explore the full range of approaches to the surreal these writers use, from the sonnet to the prose poem, the comic to the allegorical, seeking to produce work which has as much in common with The Simpsons as with the medium of Keats.

We will look at how younger writers like Dean Young and Michael Robbins have worked with this inheritance, and at the poems of a number of British and Irish writers, including Stephen Knight, Emily Berry and Simon Armitage, who often work with the same tools as these great Americans. Through a mixture of close reading, written exercises and feedback, we will seek to develop our own surreal poems to entertain, delight and to illuminate anew the real world.

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