Transforming the Raw: Poetry and conflict

About

Based entirely after hours in the galleries at Tate Modern, this poetry course is a chance to engage closely with international masterpieces to develop your own poetry in unexpected directions. Sigmar Polke's works that comment and reflect on post-war Germany through experiments with materials such as meteor dust, potatoes, uranium and bubble wrap, serve as an inspiration for writing. These alchemical images invite you to invent ways of transforming the raw material of your own lives into poetry. Visits to the Alibis: Sigmar Polke, Conflict, Time, Photography exhibitions and Tate's collection, as well as discussions around works by leading contemporary poets, offer inspiration to your own writing with opportunity to work in small groups for feedback on poems in progress. This course is suitable for writers with some experience of poetry workshops. Ticket price includes drinks following the course sessions. Pascale Petit's sixth poetry collection Fauverie is published in 2014; a portfolio of poems from it won the Manchester Poetry Prize. Her fifth book What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and Wales Book of the Year. It was a Book of the Year in the Observer. She has had three books shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. A Next Generation poet, she has been Poetry Editor of Poetry London and is a founding tutor of The Poetry School. This event is related to the exhibition Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963—2010