How can an understanding of the techniques of past living poets help your own work? This course will explore many kinds of rhythmical language, from Beowulf to Hamilton, from Alexander Pope's exquisite, witty eighteenth-century couplets to the sprung rhythms and half-rhymes of modern spoken word poetry.

A theme throughout will be the way that rhythms and rhymes start to carry the writer along to places they never expected to go. The emphasis will be practical, with students writing their own work every week.

This is a course for everyone who enjoys memorable writing and wishes to transmute the tangles and passions of experience into art that delights, moves and communicates.