What is lost and gained when we repeat ourselves? How do cyclicality and replication, order and disruption, familiarity and rearrangement, alter how we engage with poetic images? How can formal and linguistic constraints equip us in our practice of writing in traditional forms? If you have ever wanted to write a ghazal, sestina or villanelle, or if you are curious about how anaphora, refrains and mirroring can produce echoes that resound and remain, this generative writing workshop with Isabelle Baafi is for you.

In this workshop we will test the limits of syntax and grammar, and gain new mastery of arranging words in order to expose new meanings. We will examine the use of repeated sounds, words, lines and stanzas in work by poets including Mimi Khalvati, Jamila Woods and Arthur Sze. We will deconstruct forms such as the triolet, the specular poem and the pantoum to create new cycles of language and new ways of rephrasing, reliving, remembering. We will discover overlooked ways to energise our poems, as well as what we can make new in the doing-over. What bears repeating. What is lost and gained when we repeat ourselves.

Isabelle Baafi is the author of Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber / Wesleyan University Press, 2025), which is a Poetry Book Society (PBS) Recommendation, and Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020), which won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a PBS Pamphlet Choice. Her writing has been published in Granta, the TLS, The Poetry Review, Callaloo, The London Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a Ledbury Poetry Critic and an Obsidian Foundation Fellow. She edits at Poetry London and Magma._

We’re able to offer 2 bursary tickets to this workshop for those facing financial difficulty. Please email bmanning@poetrysociety.org.uk to request one of the places. No proof of financial difficulty is required.