Creative Writing: Sound, Rhythm and the Senses

@ with Sarah Fletcher 19.00 – 21:00 People are often inspired and baffled by poetry. As a teacher, the question I am asked most is still ‘what does this poem mean?’ This course begins elsewhere. Before meaning, there is sound. Before interpretation, there is rhythm. From these, sense begins to gather. Set within the Steiner space, the course takes seriously Rudolf Steiner’s insight that “Every vowel is a soul-mood, and every consonant an imprint of the world.” We will treat language as something lived and shaped through the body, attending to how sound moves within the room, how repetition alters it, how voice creates atmosphere. We will explore how poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas use sound as a generative force, allowing language to move, echo, and accumulate into meaning. Students will write out of sound, letting patterns call up image and feeling almost involuntarily. We will also work with the environment beyond the room. Regent’s Park becomes part of the course, offering sensory experiences to inspire our writing. Through recitation, repetition, and vocal exercises, this course invites you to inhabit language before writing it, and to return each week as that sensitivity deepens. As Steiner writes, “In speech the human being experiences him/herself as soul.” The course culminates in a voluntary sharing of poems written at a public Poetry Evening in the Bookshop on 18th June.