Join Nell Regan poet, non fiction writer (and beginning painter!) for a relaxed and stimulating poetry workshop suitable for all levels. We’ll take our inspiration from the current ArtNetdlr exhibition at Walters, Looking Out.
Over the course of 2 hours we’ll look at some very different poems to get ideas of ‘ways in’ we might take. Participants will then spend time with the exhibition and settle on one or more pieces to work from, ‘sketching’ ideas and fragments of poems. We will gather again to read and discuss some of these ‘sketches’/ draft poems and look at possible ways forward.
Poets and writers have often made use of visual art as subject matter and as a springboard for new work. From Auden’s iconic ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ (“ About suffering they were never wrong/ The Old Masters…’ ) to Paul Durcan’s irreverent 1990’s book Crazy About Women (based on his selection of some of the National Gallery’s best loved paintings) there are as many ways to approach this as there are poets ( or painters) A painting can even be the central antagonist of a novel as in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch.
Nell Regan is a poet and non-fiction writer who has published three collections of poetry including ‘Preparing for Spring’ (Arlen House) and ‘One Still Thing’ (Enitharmon Press). She has been a Fellow at the International Writing Programme, Iowa, a Fulbright Scholar at UC Berkeley, a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellow and recipient of two Arts Council Literature Bursaries. Her biography ‘Helena Molony, A Radical Life 1883–1967’ (Arlen House) was a 2017 Irish Independent Book of the Year while her latest book is ‘A Gap in the Clouds: A New Translation of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu’, with James Hadley (Dedalus Press) She teaches poetry workshops at all levels and was for several years adjunct faculty at IES, a US Study Abroad Programme. www.nellregan.com
