Editing: Make Your Poetry Shine - Writing Workshop with Katrina Naomi

1-4pm 12 October 
The Writers' Block, The Ladder, 2-4 Clinton Road, Redruth, TR15 2QE
Tickets: £20/£25 

Katrina says: I'm a great believer in getting whatever you want to say down, to really splurge on the page but then how do we hone those words, shape them into the best version of themselves? In this practical workshop, Katrina Naomi will address writing titles with oomph and zing, making your verbs truly active, freeing up your lines, and discuss ideas on form and freedom. She will help you to make your poems shine - who knows they might even catch a judge's or an editor's eye?

Falmouth Poetry Group will be gathering after the workshop for a Poetry Reading & Conversation between Katrina Naomi and Penelope Shuttle at 4.30pm. If you would like to go to the reading, but can't make the workshop, please buy a ticket for the reading only HERE.

About the writer: 

Katrina Naomi is an award-winning poet, performer, mentor and judge. Her new poetry collection, Battery Rocks, (Seren, 2024) is the winner of the Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors. Katrina’s previous collections have won an Authors’ Foundation Award and Saboteur Award, and she is a recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize. Katrina’s poetry has appeared on Poems on the Underground, BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Poetry Please, and in The TLS, The Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. She has a PhD from Goldsmiths. Katrina lives in Cornwall  www.katrinanaomi.co.uk

Battery Rocks by Katrina Naomi

“Each poem rolls in and out like the sea and refreshes like a wild swim.” – Roger Robinson

In Battery Rocks, Katrina Naomi returns to the Cornish swimming spot – Battery Rocks in Penzance – every day for a year. On each swim, she finds something fresh and invigorating.

Exploring the sea in all its mercurial forms, Naomi questions the world through the lens of nature and the more than human. Poems like ‘And if there were no sea?’, which recognises both the power and danger of the sea, as well as all that would be lost if it didn’t exist, approach the climate emergency from aslant, offering a new take on one of the most pressing concerns of our times.

Naomi also examines issues of fear, strength and vulnerability, writing in response to an attempted rape and other experienced attacks. She questions how she can feel safer alone, in a raging sea in winter, in nothing but a swimming costume, than on dry land. In poems like ‘The Sea Speaks’ and ‘i.m. Sarah Everard’, the risks of swimming are juxtaposed with the dangers on shore for women.

Battery Rocks revels in friendship, love and community. The Cornish language and landscape are deeply entwined, and Naomi deftly experiments with poems in Kernewek (Cornish) and English. The collection ends in the strange beauty of ‘in the kelp forest’, winner of the prestigious Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. Finding joy through immersion in nature, Battery Rocks is a thoughtful meditation on nature, risk, swimming and the sea.

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 id 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. When funds allow, we run readings, creative workshops and other poetry events. ALL WELCOME. 18+