A Decade Teaching Poetry Workshops At Galway Arts Centre

In September 2004 George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were running for re-election; Iraq was on its way towards chaos; the Beslan school hostage crisis in Chechnya ended very violently; Michael D. Higgins was a Featured Reader at that month's Over The Edge: Open Reading in Galway City Library; and I began teaching poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre. For more about what was happening in the world that month, see here.

In the decade since many participants in those workshops have gone on to achieve publication. Lorna Shaughnessy, Mary Madec, Susan Lindsay, Kevin O'Shea (RIP), Jean Kavanagh, Sarah Clancy, Mary Hanlon, Aideen Henry, Donna Potts, John Walsh, Micéal Kearney, Mary Mullen, & Deirdre Kearney have all published collections of their poems.  

The next set of workshops, which are open to both beginners and those who've been writing poems for a while, start the third week of September. For details see here. 

You can read 'Workshop Laws', my self parody of the helpful suggestions I tend to make at workshops, here. 

Poetry Workshop Laws

Workshop Laws

Your poems must be devoid

of cacophony, hope,

shards, love and anything

that could be described as

mellifluous. You will wage war on

‘and’. Participles will be rarer

than dry Irish Augusts;

it will almost always be ‘go’,

hardly ever ‘going’. ‘But’

and its best friend ‘then’

will be interrogated

severely at every checkpoint,

only allowed through

if they don’t give

the game away. Excessive

use of the hyphen must be

ruthlessly rooted out. Whatever  

you compare her to, 

let it not be a summer’s day.  However

bad the crisis gets,

never go in search of a word

that rhymes with

bankers. Now

it’s been discovered,

the God particle

is the new tsunami,

and like every daytime

radio commonplace,

no longer acceptable.

Never say: “I’m sad.”

Show us the wallpaper

in the room where

you thought about

ending it. 

Here I am with some of the participants in one of my poetry workshops this year.

One of my students, Nicki Griffin, at the launch of her first collection of poetry in November. For more about Nicki's book see the Salmon Poetry website.

Above is a poem in which I poke a bit of fun at the sort of advice I typically give participants as to how they might (hopefully) make their poems better. I love working with new poets on their poems. If you're interested in trying your hand at a few poems yourself, you might perhaps be interested in joining us for one of the January workshops. Full details below. 

"Starting in January, Galway Arts Centre is offering aspiring poets a choice of three poetry workshops, all facilitated by poet Kevin Higgins, whose best-selling first collection, The Boy With No Face, published by Salmon Poetry, was short-listed for the 2006 Strong Award for Best First Collection by an Irish poet. Kevin’s second collection of poems, Time Gentlemen, Please, was published in 2008 by Salmon Poetry and his poetry is discussed in The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry. His third collection Frightening New Furniture was published in 2010 by Salmon and his work also appears in the generation defining anthology Identity Parade –New British and Irish Poets (Ed. Roddy Lumsden, Bloodaxe, 2010). A collection of Kevin’s essays and book reviews, Mentioning The War, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2012. Kevin’s poetry has been translated into Greek, Spanish, Turkish, Italian, Japanese & Portuguese. His next collection of poetry, The Ghost in The Lobby, will be published in February 2014, also by Salmon.

Kevin is an experienced workshop facilitator and several of his students have gone on to achieve publication success. One of his workshop participants at Galway Arts Centre won the prestigious Hennessy Award for New Irish Poetry, two have won the Cúirt New Writing Prize, and yet another the Cúirt Poetry Grand Slam, while several have published collections of their poems. Kevin is also co-organiser of the successful Over The Edge reading series which specialises in promoting new writers. 


Each workshop will run for ten weeks, commencing the week of January 20^th. They will take place on Tuesday evenings, 7-8.30pm (first class January 21^st); on Thursday afternoons, 2-4pm (first class January 23^rd) and on Friday afternoons, 2-3.30pm (first class January 24th).


The Tuesday evening and Friday afternoon workshops are open to both complete beginners as well as those who’ve been writing for some time. The Thursday afternoon workshop is an Advanced Poetry Workshop, suitable for those who’ve participated in poetry workshops before or had poems published in magazines. The cost to participants is €110, with an €100 concession rate.

Places must be paid for in advance. To reserve a place contact reception at Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominick Street, phone 091 565886 or email info@galwayartscentre.ie"

  

"Des Kavanagh tells me I should take one of your poetry workshops." Seamus Heaney 1939-2013

I met Seamus Heaney twice. The first time was after my Strong Award shortlist reading at the Poetry Now Festival in Dun Laoghaire in 2006. There was a reception afterwards and he came up to me and said: "Des Kavanagh tells me I should take one of your poetry workshops." Des went to school with Seamus Heaney and has taken many workshops at Galway Arts Centre with me. For once, I was a bit speechless. 

The second time I met him was when in 2009 he came to the reading at Clifden Arts Week by the same workshop group Des had told him about. He was in Clifden to read at the festival himself. Afterwards, the whole group had an extended lunch in Des's apartment in Clifden with Seamus. He spent most of the time talking to the workshop participants, who are the same group who have since launched the Skylight 47 poetry paper. It was great to see.