Poetry Fine-Tuning Workshop

Overview:

You’ve got the words. Now you want to refine your poetry, for your own reading pleasure or for public events. This 8-week writing workshop will show you the techniques to take your poetry to the next level. Every two-hour class includes a feedback session to share your poetry with the group (optional participation).

This workshop series assumes members have one or more written poems at draft stage. Those who would like to start writing poetry should enquire about our next Poetry Crafting Workshop.

Course: 8 weeks, 2 hours weekly

Date: July 7, 2026 - August 25, 2026

Time: 6.30pm-8.30pm (with one 10-minute interval)

Price: $45 for single sessions, $269 for the entire 8-week course for one person; Concession $35 for a single session. Please show a non-digital student ID (with expiry date) or a valid Senior, Pensioner or other concession card when entering.

Venue: 852 Hong Kong Restaurant (Restaurant will be closed to other customers during these workshops)

Address: Shop 6a/503 King Street, Newtown, NSW 2042

Ages: 16 years and over

*Disabled access to restaurant main entry and bathroom.

*Microphone, stand and amplifier available on-site.

*Free Wi-fi available.

*Support dogs allowed.

COURSE OUTLINE:

Week 1/ The Voice Of The Poem: I, you, they: first person, second person, third. Who is the best speaker for your poem? Choosing who ‘speaks’ your words is one of the most important decisions a writer can make. Experimenting with creating a persona on the page can produce unexpected results which transform the most everyday subject. We’ll look at famous examples of poetic ‘narrators’ in confessional poems, dramatic monologues, free verse and more and examine the writing techniques – especially word-choice to evoke tone and mood – used by these authors to create memorable personas, and which you can apply to your own work.

Week 2/ The Beat: You don’t need to rhyme to find the rhythm (the ‘beat’ or ‘meter’) of your poem. Learn how to control the ‘sound(s)’ and pace of your poem, and deliver subtle rhythms on the page, by using sentence structure, vowel and syllable-selection, repetition and slant rhymes, alliteration (use of the same consonant), assonance (use of the same or similar vowel sounds), refrains and more. And for those moments when you do want to step up the pace, we’ll also look at key rules for crowd-pleasing foot-stamping rhymes, whether you want to enhance a public speech or enter a poetry slam.

Week 3/ Boost That Image 1: The most memorable poems evoke intense emotional responses in their readers. Rather than simply describing an image, they create – in words – a moment or experience so artfully that the reader personally feels that same moment or experience, a poetic technique which T. S Eliot (author of ‘The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock’) calls the “objective correlative”. Immerse the reader in your own writing by evoking combinations of the five senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste) on the page. We’ll look at poems from Arthur Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Porter, Michael Ondaatje and more. Members will be encouraged to apply the session’s writing techniques to their own draft poems.

Week 4/ Boost That Image 2: Clever use of metaphor – a form of comparison in which one thing is said to be the other – is one of the writing tools a poet can use to add complex meaning to their images. An extended metaphor – a comparison which is steadily expanded through the poem – leads its readers to what can feel like a moment of personal revelation, even when the poet is presenting familiar subjects or concepts. We’ll look at other poetic devices that you can apply to your images: personification, where human characteristics are applied to objects, animals and abstractions (physically-untouchable concepts such as love, anger, etc), and symbolism, where an object ‘stands in’ for the abstraction (such as a dove representing peace or a red rose, a passionate heart).

Week 5/ Making The Line, Breaking The Line: Poetry forms tell you where to end your line. Free verse rebels against classic line rules. Let’s try both with your words. We’ll look at how you can change the tone and impact of your poem simply by choosing where to break your line. This session will reference poetic forms – including villanelle, pantoum, sestina, sonnet and free verse – but only to demonstrate line-breaks; no prior knowledge of forms is needed. We’ll be looking at poems by Pablo Neruda, Su Hui, Dylan Thomas, Denise Levertov and more.

Week 6/ The Art Of The Turn: Sometimes the final line in a poem is not a whammy of a punch-line but an unexpected thought or image that allows the poem to lift off in a new direction – and makes the entire work resonate in a reader’s mind long afterwards. This session studies memorable endings in poetry from Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Rainer Maria Rilke, César Vallejo and more. Members will be encouraged to try these techniques in their own work. Session focus: free verse, sonnet, prose poem, ghazul and more. Includes notes on chapbook lay-out and zine-making for the Week 8 Session.

Week 7/ Page To Mic, And More: This week we’ll look at preparing your poems for submission to competitions and poetry publications and for reading at public events. With bonus free microphone practice session (optional participation, outside the class time-slot). We’ll review the guidelines for the current, major poetry competitions and publishers, in Australia and internationally. We’ll also look at longer poetry forms that can inspire making your own chapbook. Session focus includes Carolyn Forché’s abecedarian poem ‘On Earth’, Wallace Stevens’ sequence poem ‘Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird’ and American poet Amanda Gorman’s spoken word, Presidential Inauguration poem ‘The Hill We Climb’.

Week 8/ Let’s Make A Poetry Chapbook! And Course Review. No poet needs to publish: writing poetry for your eyes only can be reward enough. But preparing your poem for publication often reveals hidden weaknesses in meaning or lay-out. Having a good working knowledge of the printing process will improve your editing skills and help you avoid future publishing disasters. Participating students can discuss the process of producing their own 8-page, printed chapbook of poems (author's copy production costs included in course fee). Members can also make their own zines (a small magazine, often photocopied and illustrated). Or include your poem in a class anthology booklet to be sold at poetry events and market stalls. We’ll also recap any course topics nominated by the class.

The aim of this course is to:

show students the subtler techniques of poetry-writing which they can apply to their own work;

examine the structures of famous poems – including their line-breaks, word-choices and imagery – to help students become better readers of others’ poetry and better editors of their own work;
give students personalized feedback on the poems they opt to share in class;
learn key editing essentials, including how to prepare a poem for competitions, publishing in poetry journals, public readings and poetry slams.

What to bring:

Please bring pen and paper or fully charged device if you wish to record written notes.

House Rules:

No photos, video filming or audio recording during class.
Please do not eat during class.
Available to purchase at the restaurant before and after class, and in intervals: juice, tea, soft drinks.
Available to buy after class: wine, beer.
This is a safe space: please show respect to staff and all members of the class.
Please ensure your mobile devices are all on silent mode.

ABOUT THE TEACHER

Roberta Lowing’s first collection of poetry, Ruin (a 55-poem sequence on the Iraq War), was co-winner of the 2011 Asher Literary Award. Her second full-length collection of lyric poems, The Searchers, was published in 2014. Her most recent collection, This Attic Of Fire, references historical and looming environmental disasters.

Roberta's poems have appeared in journals such as Meanjin, Cordite, Southerly, Overland, Rabbit, Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology, Best Australian Poems and Aesthetica Creative Writing Award Anthology (UK).

Her concrete poem, ‘The Cheese Poem’, appears in the 2025 illustrated anthology, This Is Us: Essential Australian Poems For Young People,published by the National Library of Australia.

Roberta publishes the free, weekly, Poetry News e-newsletter of local poetry events, now in its seventh year, with e-subscribers in Australia, England, India and America. She also publishes the print version of the monthly, Poetry News Magazine; Gareth Jenkins’ Apothecary Archive Press publishes the monthly e-magazine.

Roberta also hosts the weekly poetry event – Open Mic Poetry Mondays – at 8:52 Restaurant, King Street, Newtown, Sydney. A former full-time film critic for Fairfax Newspapers and producer-director of a weekly environmental program for Channel 31 Community Television, Roberta also holds a PhD on female screen representation awarded by the University of Sydney.

Course Enquiries

Please email rlowing2024@gmail.com

Venue Enquiries

Please email eightfiftytwo2042@gmail.com

or call 0450270705

Contact the host of Poetry Fine-Tuning Workshop - Newtown Sydney

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