In this eight-week online course we will consider how we say things in poetry, how we find and adapt our subject matter, how we integrate and depart from our sources.
We will discuss in detail how to take inspiration from historical, contemporaneous, ekphrastic, intertextual, and geographical sources.
We will also consider how we incorporate, adapt, and transform our own lives into poetry. Each week we will analyse and discuss a number of exemplary poems, and participants will then be set the task of writing a new poem from a different source. The resulting poems will be shared and workshopped in class the following week.
Leeanne Quinn is the author of Before You (Dedalus, 2012) and Some Lives (Dedalus, 2020). She co-edited Romance Options: Love Poems for Today (Dedalus, 2022) and, most recently, edited Beginnings Over and Over: Four New Poets from Ireland (Dedalus, 2025). She holds a PhD in American Literature from Trinity College Dublin, and has taught poetry at LMU Munich, and mentored as part of the Dedalus Press Mentoring Scheme. Her third collection of poetry is forthcoming in 2026 with Carcanet Press.
This course will take place online on Wednesdays for 8 weeks.
Dates: 4 February - 25 March 2026, 7.00 pm - 9.00 pm
Location: Online
Cost: €250 (€225 Members)
Book your place here