Five things I learned from my poetry course

At the end of last year (yes, this is a very belated post!) I took an evening course entitled ‘Poetry Essentials: Writing Free Verse’. This was a six-week short course run by the Lifelong Learning department at the University of Southampton, which took up two hours every Tuesday night.

Each week, I would haul myself to their venue after work and sit reading through the latest class paperwork, listening to podcasts and drinking hot chocolate from the overpriced vending machine as I waited for each session to start.

And each week, I’d get my Uber back home and explain to the driver that I was trying to write poetry but, no, I wasn’t any good and, yes, most poets enjoy a drink while they write and, no, most of us don’t make money from it and, yes, I would deny that I was any good.

I had been (as…