I always try to try all iterations of professional creative work once. Running adult courses face to face, with lots of different institutions, has been one of the most up and down endeavours for me. Some have created extraordinary new pathways for me, and loads of new friendships, genuinely. Others have been draining, pressured experiences, where participants use the format to unload after a hard day at work. I’m always up for doing them at new places, but when I had done online courses in the past, I found them rewarding but difficult - the removed nature tends to obfuscate the main reason I teach - to meet people, to communicate. Recently, with the lockdown bla blah I decided to go again, more seriously than before and set up a course called Seen as Read. I wrote entirely new material for it, blended that with previous explorations. I put my heart into it really, as it felt a new venture, a new moment. It has just ended and is perhaps the most exciting, rewarding, generous experience I have had teaching, including face to face work. The level of those involved, the insight, generosity, innovation - it really felt like a brief community. So many people signed up, which was inevitably very validating, and then so much support was offered for my approach, detailing a prehistoric to present history of visual poetries, then going into asemic writing, art poetry, poster art, text art, concrete poetry, collage and the like, this also was uplifting. The screenshot above shows the tiles of the blogforum set up as our interface. Each tile represents a post by a participant poet, each filled with their work and thoughts, responding to the themes of the week. Extraordinary. You can look at the work too, it’s now made publicly available with the permission of the poets https://seenasread.blogspot.com/ & https://visualpoetrycourse.blogspot.com/