A workshop exploring how a Poem Starts and what to do with it when it does.

We will look at those moments of inspiration, the feelings, ideas and ‘voice sparks’ when something unlikely or even anticipated opens a line into a poem. How do we sustain and nourish that ‘flicker’? How do we recognise it? How do we take bearings? What kind of scaffold do we need, if any, to help it take, and what kind of tool kit?

This workshop will explore the first stages of writing a poem, and fun stages, to get lost in process, to find the poem on its terms, to consider elements of craft. It will be a workshop of questions and prompts around the strangeness of writing, with some reading and group discussion to reflect on the experience of the writing process.

Meeting link will be sent to participants in advance.

Sean Borodale

Sean Borodale works as an artist, writer, poet. He is currently Poetry Ireland/ Éigse Éireann Poet In Residence (2026 – 2028). He studied and later taught at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he was also until recently Hon. Research Fellow in print and text. He has four collections of poetry published by Jonathan Cape. His debut Bee Journal (2012) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and Costa Book Award.

His latest collection Inmates was described in the Harvard Review as achieving ‘existential subliminty unlike anything else in contemporary poetry’. He was a Granta New Poet in 2012 and a Poetry Book Society Next Generation Poet in 2014. Mighty Beast, a documentary poem for BBC Radio 3 about cattle markets and modern farming practices in the UK won a Radio Academy Gold Award for Best Feature or Documentary.

His topographical poem Notes for an Atlas (Isinglass 2007), written whilst walking around London, was adapted and directed as a performance by Mark Rylance for London’s Southbank Festival Hall. Fellowships and residences include Guest Artist at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam, Oscar Wilde Visiting Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Creative Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge, inaugural writer-in-residence at Portiuncula University Hospital, ‘Data Stories’ writer-in-residence in Social Sciences Maynooth University, and the National Museum of Ireland’s ‘Onsight’ commission