What The Light Tells (15e):
From 6 April 2025

POETRY TRANSFIGURES trouble into beauty, chaos into coherence. Since trouble and chaos always threaten, on the streets, in the world, in someone’s heart, this is always poetry’s moment.

Poetry is a deeper speaking, good for witnessing and doing justice to the deeper structures of personal experience and public catastrophe, of minutes and of hours, of deep selfhood and small eternities. Poetry that lasts, far from being obscure, is a radical clarity. An X-ray of a moment of Being, as Henri Cole put it; a short telling of the inner life of the actual world.

Because of what it knows about image and metaphor and speech music; because it sculpts one small voice into a habitable space—a hearth, say, or a garden—poetry, more than any other art humans have made, catches the myth in the moment and casts a reader in it—revived, forgiven, made safe in her vulnerability. Poetry is an accompanied solitude.

So, it is always poetry’s moment—even when, as now, in the west, too much poetry has lost touch with people who are almost beginning to forget how much they need it to help them find meaning in worlds and lives from which meaning has largely taken flight, and when readers and booksellers are losing patience with poetry, much of which seems too obscure, sanctimonious or unlovely to be of much use in a tight spot or quiet moment.

Poetry—one organic, authentic, and inimitable intelligence given voice—is precisely what artificial intelligence, by its nature, will never find a way to be or say. I’ve always thought we need poetry because we have politics, because we have commerce; but perhaps we now need poetry because too much intelligence has grown artificial.

Could this also be your time for poetry, then—to come to it, to return to it, to learn to read it, to write it with more grace?

“Life is a spell so exquisite,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “that everything conspires to break it.” Poetry, I think, recasts life’s spell.

On Sunday 6 April 2025, the fifteenth edition of my online poetry masterclass What The Light Tells kicks off. The masterclass, for all poets, is offered —six Sunday evenings (from 6pm Australian Eastern Standard Time) from 6 April (Sunday mornings in the US and Canada).

Run to great acclaim since May 2020, the masterclass draws poets from around the world. It’s met a need for a sustained workshop, strong on technique and inspiration, on form and experimentation; it sustains a close and tender focus on each student’s new work and on what can be learned from reading fine poetry from across all ages and cultures. And because it’s online, you can join from wherever you are—no travel required.

IN FOUR-HOUR classes, conducted on Zoom, once a week over six weeks, we explore the craft of poetry—the skills, understandings, devices and disciplines that allow poets to animate everyday speech, to cast the light that poetry throws, to divine everyday experience, and to re-enchant daily life and the places where we live it. You’ll come out the other end a better poet, more knowledgeable about the choices poets make, more skilful at this dark and enlightening art.

Each week Mark shares two or three key ideas and practices; each week he explores one of the six gifts of poetry; each week you try three or four new poetic forms; each week you workshop new poems; and each week we let great poems guide our writing.

What the Light Tells is for everyone—beginners and published poets. Run online (in English), it’s open to poets everywhere.

“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.” (Annie Hunter, Masterclass of August 2020).

The masterclass offering includes the option of an hour’s consultation one-on-one with Mark (via Zoom).