Register now for my latest Online Poetry Masterclass, starting 11 July: learn the craft that keeps us human
POETRY HAS an account to make of what all other discourses overlook, deny or disdain: the inner life of the actual world—in particular, what it feels like and what it means to lead one finite human life among all this beauty and terror this one short while. We are languaging beings; we go better when our language thrives, and poetry helps language thrive.
These are articles of my faith, but if poetry is to achieve any of this, like any art, it needs to be well made. There is a craft to it—lineation, rhythm, metonymy, form—and you can get better at its craft under tutelage. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it happen, for instance, in my online poetry masterclass, What the Light Tells. The fifth edition of which (the second for this year) begins on 11 July.
Register at my website: https://www.marktredinnick.com/what-the-light-tells
I’ll send you a copy of my fourth collection Walking Underwater (May 2021, PSP) https://www.marktredinnick.com/walking-underwater. In an afterword in that book, I say this:
By refuting in its language and its approach to what is real the deadening discourses and dictates of ideology, poetry dissents. Its dissent is the heart’s, the body’s, the mind’s. Poetry is the dissenter’s discourse. It practises and models a way of seeing and being and saying that each human being needs to find, if they are to come all he way true—and to learn to sand clear of the clutter of what one is told one is or is not or should be or should not be… Refusing orthodoxies, practising plurality, poetry closes distances down. There is a way of dying to one’s self, Rumi writes, and coming back plural; and I think poetry is that way.
“Love is a radical generosity,” I wrote in an essay for Valentine’s Day this year; “poetry is its idiom.”
To explore poetry’s way, to deepen into language, love’s idiom—or just to learn more poetic craft, join us online from 11 July. (Classes are run on zoom, so join in wherever you are, locked down or free range; northern hemisphered or south.)
As ever, I’m running two classes in parallel: one on Sunday evenings (from 11 July, 6pm to 9:30pm Australian Eastern Standard Time); another on Wednesday mornings (from 14 July,9am to 12:30pm AEST). One class a week for six successive weeks. Plenty of spaces still available, but do book soon: the masterclass tends to book out.
Register here: https://www.marktredinnick.com/what-the-light-tells.
THE SUNDAY class (evening in Sydney; morning in Europe) has European poets in mind; the WEDNESDAY morning class (Tuesday evening in North America) will suit US and Canadian poets. Either time works for poets across Australia and the region.
Chuck Volpe, who took the masterclass in March this year, had this to say: Mark Tredinnick’s poetry masterclass is more than just learning how to write poetry––it’s a life experience. It connects the spirit within you to a magical world beyond. I wish I had done it 50 years ago!
Don’t leave it fifty years; enrol now: https://www.marktredinnick.com/what-the-light-tells.
Another alumna, Annie Hunter, writes:
Mark’s teaching is always generous, erudite and enlivening. What the Light Tells will draw you irresistibly into the discipline of the lyric—in all its immensity and intimacy. I cannot praise this course enough. It has utterly transformed my approach to writing poetry, and will continue to do so, as I work with its animating ideas and exercises in poetic form.
International Times: Session 1: London (GMT): Sunday 11 July to Sunday 15 August 2021, 9:00am–12:30pm. Session 2: New York/Toronto (EST): Tuesday 13 July to Tuesday 17 July 2021, 7:00pm––10:30pm
Register here (https://www.marktredinnick.com/what-t...) FEE * $880 AUD for six sessions (twenty-one hours) * $180 for an optional one-on-one with Mark.
