Imagined Cities: Poetry Workshop

Magma Poetry editor Stav Poleg hosts a workshop on poetry and architecture in the beautiful Pembroke Auditorium

Pembroke College Auditorium
Cambridge, England

Sunday, October 11 • 1:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Book your tickets here

This event is proudly put on in collaboration with the Cambridge Poetry Festival

Join us to create your own exciting urban scenes in your poetry: coastal cities, foreign towns and metropolises. During the workshop, we will discuss how to create a strong sense of place and scenery in our poems. We will experiment with writing about familiar cities as well as places we have never been to—real and imagined. What are the challenges of writing about a very familiar place? What can we discover by writing about a city we have never been to, or by inventing a completely fictional one? We will read and discuss poems that use the city as concept—as a symbol for something else: relationship, adventures, new beginnings—as well as poems that lead us from concrete physical places into spaces of ideas and contemplations.

The workshop takes place at the beautiful Pembroke Auditorium. As part of the session, participants will be encouraged to respond to the unique architecture of this space in their poem: its history and renovation.

Imagined Cities workshop is taking place in collaboration with Magma Poetry. Subject to time, participants might be invited to share their work at the launch event of Magma’s Architecture issue on the following weekend.*

*Depending on number of participants and availability at the launch

*

Stav Poleg is the author of The Banquet (shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize 2025, and the Derek Walcott Prize 2026) and The City (shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for First Collection 2023), both books published by Carcanet Press. Her poetry has appeared in leading publications on both sides of the Atlantic, most recently in The Forward Book of Poetry (Faber, 2024) and A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker (Knopf, 2025).