The poets will talk about their own experiences, skills and discoveries as writers, drawing on their own work, but also that of other poets and poems that have been influential to them.

On alternate Wednesday evenings from late January to late March 2024, 7-8pm.

Sign up to one, more, or all five. Available at £12 per hour session or £48 for all 5 masterclasses.

Each presentation will last 45-50 mins with a short space at the end to answer some questions from the attendees.

Hosted on Zoom by Nine Arches, led by poets.

Dates and full descriptions below:

Masterclass webinar: Place and self - the poet outdoors with Ian Humphreys - Wednesday 31st January 2024, 7-8pm
A decade ago, I moved to semi-rural West Yorkshire after living for 30 years in cities. I began to write. This masterclass looks at how the place in which we live can inform and inspire our work. We’ll discuss walking and writing the countryside. How to harness the power of our gaze and make it compelling to others. How to write about a place in a way that welcomes those from different worlds. How to challenge and embrace at the same time. And how to bridge gaps – between the outdoors and our inner selves, grief and joy, loss and celebration.

Masterclass webinar: The sonnet and its sonics with Jacqueline Saphra - Wednesday 14th February 2024, 7-8pm
Of all the given forms in the English language, the sonnet is the most enduring. Why? Could it be something to do with the form’s infinite flexibility of shape and content? Since Petrarch’s Italian version and Shakespeare’s English language adaptation, poets have continually revised, re-envisioned, reworked and subverted the sonnet: most recently the American poet Jericho Brown has, in his own description, ‘gutted’ the sonnet to create his newly invented version, the duplex. Here’s a chance for a gallop through the centuries, reading and playing with different interpretations of the sonnet to see what floats your own poetic and formal boat.

Masterclass webinar: Transformations - poetry, nature and the imagination with Julia Webb - Wednesday 28th February 2024, 7-8pm
In this masterclass award winning poet Julia Webb will give some insight into her creative process, looking at how nature, weather and the environment can feed into poems about domestic subjects and how metaphor and extended metaphor can be used as ways into dealing with difficult subject matter. We will look at some poems and there will be time for questions. Julia will also give you some take away prompts so you can play with these ideas yourself.

Masterclass webinar: Spinning the narrative thread in poetry with Rishi Dastidar – Wednesday 13th March 2024, 7-8pm
Both within an individual poem, and across a larger collection of work, it’s possible to use poetry as a way to both examine the motivations of characters, and to tell stories that grip, illuminate and entertain as much as prose narrative does. In this masterclass, Rishi Dastidar will draw from his experience of writing Saffron Jack, a long narrative poem, and Neptune’s Projects, to examine how and why poetry can be used to construct narratives that tell stories differently, bend time in unexpected ways, become hyper real, and pack an emotional punch.

Masterclass webinar: Evolution of a poem – the art of redrafting with Degna Stone - Wednesday 27th March 2024, 7-8pm
On rare occasions a poem will arrive as a gift, fully formed. Most of the time though, it’s going to take a little work for the poem to find its shape and begin to sing. During this masterclass Degna will take you through their process for redrafting, editing and refining a body of work, from a single poem to an entire collection. Using examples from their Nine Arches Collection Proof of Life on Earth, Degna will show you step-by-step how the poems emerged from a scrappy piece of freewriting to the final draft.

Further info and to book here.