Are you a poet looking to try out different poetic forms? Or an educator seeking resources to teach form to your students?

From 2020-22, I Am Loud Productions ran a project entitled Return to Form exploring different poetic forms, supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland. This project was designed to celebrate poetic form, commission new innovative poetry in form by contemporary UK writers, and provide free and accessible resources on how to use poetic form. I led the educational facet of Return to Form, which entailed creating in-depth video workshops on fourteen different poetic forms: the golden shovel, Shakespearean sonnet, univocal poem, concrete poem, sestina, contrapuntal poem, villanelle, found poem, palindrome poem, terza rima, renga, list poem, standard habbie, and erasure poem. I also facilitated the four-part miniseries Form Fundamentals, which included an introduction to form and episodes on structure, rhyme, and metre. All of these workshops are designed to be accessible to ages 14+ with any level of experience in writing poetry. Each workshop is freely accessible through this playlist on our YouTube channel and fully closed captioned.

Here’s a brief trailer explaining how the workshops work and what you need to take part:

You can take all of the workshops through this playlist on our YouTube channel. Enjoy!

‘I’ve been watching few episodes of this series and I find it enlightening. It explains how poems work with enough details to understand what’s at play in the composition of a poem but the explanations are clear, structured, all the terms are defined and it’s a pleasure to follow the path each video lays out on a given theme. For someone who knows nothing about poetry, this is like a translation guide.’ – Nathan Locatelli, comment on the Form Fundamentals: Rhyme workshop

‘super super helpful. This form seems so daunting at first, but I now have a first draft of my first sestina, thank you.’ – Lindsay O, comment on the Sestina workshop

‘This is super amazing! So much quality information packed into a beautifully presented video.’ – Eleanor Williams, comment on the Concrete Poem workshop