Thinking in Fragments: (Re)Writing Meaning through Poetry
A 4-week Poetry Writing Course with
Anthony Anaxagorou
When: Four Wednesdays from June 17-July 8
18:30-20:30 (London Time)
Where: Online, via Zoom
Fee: £200 (15% off for LABRC Members)
Price exclude Ticket Tailor fees
Taking inspiration from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Death Tractates, this course will focus on a different subject each week as a means of inquiring into ways we can offer readers a new perspective on a familiar and often overwritten about subject such as loss, grief and outrage.
The Tractate, as Matthew Zapruder writes in Why Poetry, ‘…became a series of very short, often gnomic declarative statements about language, reality, and knowledge.’ This short often aphoristic quality has influenced the lyric in ways that have allowed it to grow and expand over decades which has given risen to whole generations of poets who use the subject as an explanatory backdrop to excavate complex events.
In this course, we will approach the tractate as a powerful form of poetic inquiry–a method of thinking, questioning, and discovering through short, declarative fragments.
Each week will focus on a different subject–such as death, extremity, joy, or outrage–not as fixed themes, but as sites of inquiry through which language can reveal new perspectives on familiar and frequently re-visited experiences.
Working collectively, participants will experiment with writing short, declarative fragments that build toward larger constellations of meaning. Through this process, we will see how the tractate can drill down into these areas of writing and thinking, becoming not only a literary form but a method for excavation–a way of also drilling into emotional, philosophical, and experiential territory.
Across four weeks, participants will develop their own tractate sequences, learning how fragmentation, repetition, and conceptual focus can generate insight and reshape familiar subjects into new forms of understanding.
This course welcomes poets (of all levels), writers, researchers, and reflective practitioners interested in exploring how poetic form can function as inquiry–a means of investigating experience, language, and meaning through deliberate structure and concentrated thought.
Biography:
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 collection and the founder and curator of WriteBack, a quarterly literary series held at the British Library.
In 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.
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