Are you drawn to horror, the weird, or surreal? Are you enraged and revolted by society and the world we live in? Do you find ‘nice’ poetry fails to reflect your feelings about life in our age of anxiety? Perhaps writing with a wry, sardonic humour helps?

In this course we’ll explore dark, comic irony and learn how to find humour in the grotesque; we’ll consider the Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms, who lived, wrote and died, under the Stalinist regime; we’ll read the strange and distorted mock fables of American prose poet, Russell Edson; we’ll take influence from the horror and scientific hallucinatory poems of Swedish poet Aase Berg and the French-Egyptian surrealist Joyce Mansour, well-known for her erotic intensity and wild humour (accused of vulgarity by some at the time).

Vik Shirley’s chapbook, Corpses (Sublunary Editions), was published in 2020. Her collection, The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN Press), her book of photo-poetry, Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock Press), and her pamphlet, Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse (Beir Bua Press), were published in 2021. Her work has appeared in such places as Poetry London, The Rialto, Magma, 3am Magazine, Shearsman and Tentacular. She edits Mercurius Magazine’s ‘Surreal-Absurd’, is Associate Editor of Sublunary Editions, and is studying for a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal at the University of Birmingham.

Date: 5 November 2022, 10.30am – 4.30pm (GMT)
Location: Online
Cost: £88

Further details and to book here