Is there a place that haunts you? Fascinates you? Delights you? Defines you?
Would you like to capture the unique sense of a place?
What might the spirits of places bring to your writing?
 
Genius Loci: The Spirit of Place
 
Places include and exceed us, they persist and evolve though time, and each place has an animated spirit of its own. So, how can poetry capture that unique sense of a place? On this course, you will learn to recognise the characters of places, find their local languages, and speak with their resident spirits. You will transform your own observations, experiences and memories into poems redolent of place, whether natural, urban, wild, familiar, foreign, new, old, vast or small. You will be inspired by writers such as WS Graham, Jen Hadfield, Alice Oswald, Federico Garcia Lorca and Walt Whitman, to understand how these poets have expressed the spirits of places.
 
Learn in your own time with this 5-part downloadable writing course. Each lesson contains a written lecture on a different aspect of place poetry with poems and extracts to inspire you, as well as exercises to put it all into practice and to get you writing about the places that move you. 
 
Genius Loci: The Spirit of Place was originally run by The Poetry School in Spring 2024.