What does it mean to meditate inside a poem? To start in the corner of an idea and work outwards, or to take a phrase, a feeling and draw out from its centre an entire new perspective? Many poems appear to focus on a single idea, but on closer inspection are meditation on several ideas at once, pulling into their centre all the sensorial material associated to the idea. In this workshop participants will look at how a poem can sustain itself through language, pacing, surprise, rumination and revelation. We’ll think about poems by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Fred Moten, Kathleen Graber and Frank Stanford. 

The ultimate goal is to have our poems ping and pulse, to interweave ideas, arguments, feelings, movement and cinema into one space, with the overarching intention of having a sustained meditation on the page. 

Max: 30 ppl
Price £25
Duration 3 hours

Anthony Anaxagorou FRSL is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist and publisher. His third collection, Heritage Aesthetics published with Granta Poetry in 2022, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award. It was listed as one of New Statesman’s top books of 2022. His second collection, After the Formalities published with Penned in the Margins, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize along with the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year. In 2020 he published How To Write It with Merky Books; a practical guide fused with tips and memoir looking at the politics of writing as well as the craft of poetry and fiction along with the wider publishing industry.

Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press. He is the editor-in-chief of Propel Magazine, an online literary journal featuring the work of poets yet to publish a first collectionIn 2019 he was made an honorary fellow at the University of Roehampton. In 2023 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Playback

If you are unable to attend this workshop, we’re pleased to be able to make a session recording available for purchase for limited duration viewing — PLAYBACK: The Expansive Meditation with Anthony Anaxagorou Recording

Purchase Link

When you purchase this item, you will be directly emailed a link to a document for downloading. This document contains the zoom link for the session. Please note that you should download this document within 24 hours of opening the link otherwise it expires (if you do have any issues with this please email press@outspokenldn.com)

Zoom Recording

Please note that this Zoom session will be recorded. A playback link will be sent afterwards to all participants in that session. Password-protected playback links are also available for purchase for limited duration viewing.