The Poetry Course at NZ Writers' College

Discover your poetic voice and develop your craft in this online poetry course at NZ Writers' College mentored by an award-winning New Zealand poet.

What will you learn?

Students will practise their own poetry. They are encouraged to explore the truth that resides in a cliché and to coax this truth into fresh lines. They are guided to craft their words into workable forms with the goal of preparation for publication.

Each unit will present standard concepts, offer new tools as they appear in a poem from the canon of English literature, and students will have the opportunity to practise new skills. The tasks are interactive so that by the end of the three modules, the student has built a portfolio of poems and has develped a finer sense of the kind of poetry he or she wants to write.

Course Details: full details here

Modules: Three Modules

Duration: Three to six months

Start date: At any time; applications all year round

Student completes 15 poetry exercises with one-to-one instruction from a tutor. By the end of the course, students should have three to six poems ready to submit to a literary journal.

Course Tutors:

Owen Bullock has published poetry, haiku, tanka, haibun, short stories, essays and reviews in over one hundred publications in eight countries. His books include a collection of poetry, sometimes the sky isn’t big enough, (Steele Roberts, New Zealand, 2010); haiku: wild camomile (Post Pressed, Australia, 2009), and the novella, A Cornish Story (Palores, UK, 2010). His poetry and haiku have won awards on numerous occasions, including 2nd Prize in the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition and Co-Winner of the Haiku International Association Competition, both 2009.

Owen gained an M.A. (Hons) from the University of Waikato. He has been an editor of a number of literary journals, including Poetry NZ, and was the inaugural poetry editor of Bravado. He is currently on the International Editorial Board for both Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Vol. 4, and the online journal, Axon: Creative Explorations (University of Canberra).

Majella Cullinane has had poems, short stories and reviews published in Ireland, the UK, the US and New Zealand. Her first poetry collection, Guarding the Flame was published by Salmon Poetry, Ireland in 2011. 

She has previously received a Sean Dunne Young Writer's Award for Poetry, the Hennessy XO/Sunday Tribune Literary Award for Emerging Poetry and also an Irish Arts Council Award to study for an MLitt in Creative Writing at St. Andrew's University Scotland. She has worked as a Writer in Residence in Ireland and Scotland.

Originally from Ireland, Majella now resides in Paekakariki on the Kapiti Coast.

Admission Requirements:

• Students must be proficient in the English Language
• E-mail and Internet access required
• No previous tertiary qualification required
• Please note: this is not a theory-heavy course, but rather, is focused on writing poems that are then critiqued.

Curriculum:

Module One: An Introduction to Poetry

•- Where do poets find their inspiration?

•- Line length and line breaks

•- Tasks

Module Two: Figures of Speech in Poetry

•- Why we use figures of speech

•- Understanding metaphors, similes and poetic devices

•- Tasks

Module Three: Rhythm and Rhyme

•- Must a poem rhyme?

•- Understanding rhythm

•- Using assonance, consonance, alliteration and other sound effects

•- Tasks