The Age of Invention: Workshop with Isabelle Baafi by Falmouth Poetry Group

https://www.tickettailor.com/events/thewritersblock/1927217Falmouth Poetry Group Presents:

The Age of Invention

Like any mode of thought and creativity, poetry has changed a lot in recent decades. Through constant innovation, we have seen poets open up our understanding of syntax, structure, and address. New perspectives broaden poetry's ability to articulate the complexities of life, and new forms reveal the connections between ideas and test their integrity. In this stimulating and generative workshop, participants will be led in a discussion of forms invented in recent years - such as the duplex, the golden shovel, the specular, and the coupling - as well as invented forms, erasure poems, concrete poems, and object poems. We will analyse and discuss work by Jericho Brown, Torrin A. Greathouse, Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa, Astra Papachristodoulou, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and others, before experimenting with language, repetition, ekphrasis and tactile exploration to craft our own. This workshop will also provide an instructive, encouraging space in which participants can share new work and receive feedback for developing it further.

Isabelle Baafi is the author of Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber / Wesleyan University Press, 2025), which was shortlisted for the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection 2025 and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her pamphlet Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020) won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. She won First Prize in the Winchester Poetry Prize 2023 and Second Prize in the London Magazine Poetry Prize 2022. Her writing has been published in Granta, the TLS, The Poetry Review, Callaloo, The London Magazine, and elsewhere. She edits at Poetry London and Magma.

Falmouth Poetry Group was founded in 1972 by Penelope Shuttle and the late Peter Redgrove, originally meeting in Peter's room at what was then the Falmouth College of Art on Wood Lane. It meets fortnightly for critical workshops, and acts as a discussion forum for work-in-progress. We still follow the workshop method used by The Group founded by Philip Hobsbaum, of which Redgrove was a founder member. FPG is an open-door group, and acts as a dynamic and influential source of inspiration and encouragement to poets in Cornwall, and has an excellent record of achievement. 

Isabelle Baafi will also be reading at 6pm, you are welcome to stay at The Writers' Block in between workshops, or leave and come back. For tickets for READING ONLY Click Here