Writing Poetry with Penny Drysdale

A good poem enables you to talk about difficult topics more truthfully – and to see the beauty.

Poetry can help us love the world or try to change it. It is a way to ‘yelp’, to ‘live the questions’ or to find our way ‘home’. It can detect the lies we tell ourselves or show us how to forgive, and so much more. Immerse yourself in poetry for an afternoon with Darwin poet Penny Drysdale. The workshop will include practical strategies to ‘lose control’ with our writing to generate new material, and strategies to sharpen and refine what emerges.

This workshop is exercise-based and suitable for poets of all levels of experience.

Penny Drysdale is a Darwin-based poet, lawyer and policy adviser working to reduce domestic violence. Penny has written two collections of poetry, Dew and Broken Glass (2017) and I am the Glass (2021). She lives and writes in the NT and in 2020 edited a collection of poetry by Arrernte women called Arelhekenhe Angkentye: Women’s Talk on the theme of lyapirtneme | return. Penny won the NT Literary Awards Poetry Prize in 2015.