The Volumes
The Let's Series develops poetry writing progressively, moving from first encounters with language to advanced poetic composition, revision, and memorability.
The Complete Learning Journey
Let's Crawl Published
First encounter with poetry writing:
The learner who opens Let's Crawl has almost certainly read poems before but has never been asked to write one. The hesitation is familiar: poetry feels like something other people do, people with a particular gift or a particular kind of feeling. Let's Crawl addresses that hesitation directly. It begins with the smallest units of language — single words, simple observations, the immediate world — and shows the learner that a poem can begin anywhere. By the end of this volume, the learner will have written their first poems in forms that are accessible and forgiving, and will understand that the craft is something that can be practised, not something that must be waited for.
Let's Walk
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Building the first technical foundations:
The learner entering Let's Walk has taken their first steps and is ready to understand why certain choices in a poem work and others do not. This volume introduces the formal relationship between grammar and poetic line: how a sentence behaves differently when it is broken into lines, what a clause does to the rhythm of a poem, how punctuation and line breaks interact. The hesitation at this level is not whether poetry is possible but whether it can be done correctly. Let's Walk answers that question by showing that correctness in poetry is a matter of intention and consequence, not of rules applied mechanically. By the end of this volume, the learner will write with greater awareness of how each grammatical choice shapes the poem on the page.
Let's Stroll
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The learner finding their own pace:
The learner at this level is past the initial uncertainty and has begun to develop preferences — certain forms feel comfortable, certain subjects come easily. Let's Stroll works with those preferences while gently extending them. It introduces a wider range of poetic forms and a more sustained engagement with imagery and figurative language, always grounded in the grammatical structures that underpin them. The hesitation here is often a reluctance to move beyond what is already working. By the end of this volume, the learner will have a broader technical range and a clearer sense of what their own poetic voice is beginning to sound like.
Let's Jog
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Increasing pace and technical confidence:
The learner entering Let's Jog is no longer a beginner. They have written poems, received responses to them, and begun to develop a sense of what they are trying to do. This volume increases the technical demand: more complex sentence structures, more sustained engagement with tone and voice, the relationship between the grammatical person of a poem and its emotional register. The hesitation at this level is often a gap between what the learner intends and what the poem actually does on the page. Let's Jog addresses that gap directly, giving the learner tools to close the distance between intention and execution. By the end of this volume, the learner will write with greater control over the relationship between what a poem says and how it says it.
Let's Saunter
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The learner who has time to look around:
The title signals the shift. The learner at this level is no longer in a hurry to acquire the basics. They have them. What they need now is the space to develop depth — in their reading, in their thinking about what poetry is for, and in their own writing. Let's Saunter introduces more demanding analytical frameworks while keeping composition at the centre. The hesitation here is sometimes a plateau: the learner writes competently but feels their work is not developing. By the end of this volume, the learner will have moved beyond competence into a more considered engagement with the craft.
Let's Stride
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Purposeful movement with full awareness of the ground:
Let's Stride and Let's Saunter share a readership threshold but occupy different positions in the progression. Where Let's Saunter creates space for depth, Let's Stride demands it. This volume works with the full range of grammatical and poetic resources available to a serious writer: complex syntax, the full range of figurative devices, the architecture of longer and more ambitious poems. The learner at this level knows what they want to say. What they are still learning is how to make the poem carry it without strain. By the end of this volume, the learner will write with a technical assurance that allows the poem to do its work without the craft beComing visible as effort.
Let's Roam
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The learner who is ready to explore territory without a clear map:
Let's Roam is the constraint poetry volume. It introduces forms that place strict limitations on what the poet can use — the alphabet poem, the keyboard poem, the lipogram, the univocal, the Golden Shovel — and shows the learner that constraint is not a restriction on expression but a generator of it. The learner who discovers that a poem written without a particular letter can say something that an unconstrained poem cannot is a learner who has understood something fundamental about how language and form interact. By the end of this volume, the learner will have an expanded sense of what a poem is permitted to be and a practical understanding of how formal constraint produces creative freedom.
Let's Run
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The learner who is serious:
The learner entering Let's Run has made a commitment. Poetry is not a school subject for them any longer. It is something they intend to pursue. This volume treats the poem as a designed object in which every element — line, image, syntax, tone, ending — is in right relation to every other. Nothing in a poem at this level is accidental, and nothing is beyond examination. The hesitation here is often an attachment to what has worked before: a favourite form, a characteristic image pattern, a habitual register. Let's Run asks the learner to examine those habits and understand which of them are genuine strengths and which are repetitions. By the end of this volume, the learner will approach each poem as a fresh problem to be solved rather than a familiar territory to be revisited.
Let's Surge
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The writer learning to see their own work clearly:
Let's Surge is the editing volume. It addresses what happens after the first draft exists: how to read your own work as a reader rather than a writer, how to identify what the poem is actually doing as opposed to what you intended it to do, and how to revise with precision rather than with anxiety. The learner at this level often finds editing the hardest part of the craft — not because they lack the technical knowledge but because the poem feels too close and too personal to see clearly. Let's Surge provides the frameworks and the distance. By the end of this volume, the learner will revise with the same care and attention they bring to the first draft.
Let's Dash
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The learner at the edge of their current range:
Let's Dash works at the limits. It addresses the most demanding technical and conceptual territory in the series: negative capability, advanced rhyming, the dramatic monologue, the poem that holds contradictory truths in suspension without resolving them. The learner at this level is technically accomplished. What they are reaching for is the quality that separates a technically accomplished poem from a memorable one. The hesitation here is often a fear of overreaching. Let's Dash argues that overreaching, done with full technical awareness, is exactly what the serious poet must be willing to do. By the end of this volume, the learner will have written poems that ask more of them than anything they have written before.
Let's Sprint
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The culminating volume:
Let's Sprint is the final volume of the curriculum. It brings together everything the series has taught and asks the learner to apply it at the highest level they are capable of. The focus is on memorability — the quality that makes a poem stay in the mind of a reader who has read it once and not looked at it again. Memorability is not a trick or a technique. It is the consequence of every other element of the poem being in its right place. By the end of this volume, the learner will have the full technical and imaginative resources of the craft available to them and will understand how to deploy those resources in the service of a poem that earns its place in a reader's memory.
Let's Marathon
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Let's Marathon is not a curriculum volume. It is a companion for the poet who has already crossed the threshold of publication and is ready to work at the level of a sustained, developing practice. The threshold for Let's Marathon is not age. It is publication. A published poet, regardless of when they began or how many volumes they have produced, will find in Let's Marathon a rigorous and honest engagement with the questions that a practising poet returns to throughout a working life: what the body of work is doing, where it is going, and what it still needs to learn.
Let's Begin
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Let's Begin is a planned standalone volume addressed to the reader who has not yet decided whether to write. It makes the case for why poetry writing matters — not as therapy, not as self-expression, and not as a school requirement, but as a discipline that sharpens attention, extends language, and changes the way a person reads the world. It is the volume that comes before the series begins