LOVE AND TERROR
‘The poem carries love and terror, or it carries nothing’ - Jane Hirshfield.
What makes a poem haunt us long after its read?
Join poets Caroline Bird and Rachel Long for a week-long writing retreat devoted to writing LOVE AND TERROR. Together, we’ll explore how poems hold tenderness and dread in the same breath, how intimacy can tip into unease, how beauty can destabilise, and how an ending can open a trapdoor beneath the reader.
We’ll study poets who balance vulnerability and strangeness with chaos and control, including Lucia Perillo, Marie Howe, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Jack Underwood, and Ralph Edison. We’ll also borrow from director David Lynch’s uncanny film classics to examine atmosphere, dislocation, and the power of a deeply unsettling ending.
Through generative prompts, close reading, lively discussions, and your one-to-one tutorials, you’ll learn how to build emotional tension without melodrama and how to destabilize a poem – structurally, tonally, imagistically.
Expect strange exercises, risky drafts, and the thrill of pushing your work into unexpected places.