Insights: Tool-Kit to Jump Start a Poem

oin us for our first in-person Insights session at Poetry Ireland.

This workshop will look at the problem of writing when it stops. You can feel the poem that you want to write, but it seems to stop when you try. We will look at ways to assemble a toolkit. How is your process of writing built? How does it run? What do you have to hand you can use as your took kit?

Open to poets of all experience levels.

Sean Borodale

Sean Borodale works as an artist, writer, poet. He is currently Poetry Ireland/ Éigse Éireann Poet In Residence (2026 – 2028). He studied and later taught at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he was also until recently Hon. Research Fellow in print and text. He has four collections of poetry published by Jonathan Cape. His debut Bee Journal (2012) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and Costa Book Award.

His latest collection Inmates was described in the Harvard Review as achieving ‘existential subliminty unlike anything else in contemporary poetry’. He was a Granta New Poet in 2012 and a Poetry Book Society Next Generation Poet in 2014. Mighty Beast, a documentary poem for BBC Radio 3 about cattle markets and modern farming practices in the UK won a Radio Academy Gold Award for Best Feature or Documentary.

His topographical poem Notes for an Atlas (Isinglass 2007), written whilst walking around London, was adapted and directed as a performance by Mark Rylance for London’s Southbank Festival Hall. Fellowships and residences include Guest Artist at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam, Oscar Wilde Visiting Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Creative Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge, inaugural writer-in-residence at Portiuncula University Hospital, ‘Data Stories’ writer-in-residence in Social Sciences Maynooth University, and the National Museum of Ireland’s ‘Onsight’ commission.