A School of
Awkward Genius
NO HOLDS PILLARS
Excellent & Imperfect
No Holds Poetics does not coddle. You come here to achieve mastery, not to blend in, play safe, or perfect the same old techniques.
Risk-taking & bombast over polished MFA veneer
Memetic & Magnetic
Poetry has been locked in obscurity for decades: exclusive, uninteresting and inaccessible to the general population
Our mission is to create works that transcend academia and reach out to the broader population ~ Groundbreaking, Magnetic, and Inevitable
Unsympathetic
Too often poets rush to flaunt, perfect, and aggrandize but great poetry works because it reveals something difficult, hidden, raw, and generally not talked about. It is the place where we can see our own ugliness revealed in another and discover that we are not alone in our darkness.
STOP PLAYING SMALL
AND START PLAYING WITH YOUR OWN
STRANGE GENIUS
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Your Instructor
Robin Richardson is a controversial Canadian Poet, outspoken about her forays with madness and uncloaked ambition. In 2015 she founded a safe haven for women writers, Minola Review, which published both emerging and established women writers globally. Robin’s most recent collection, Sit How You Want took home the Trillium Book and Relit Award. She holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawerence where she was the recipient of the Joan T Baldwin award and John B. Santaianni Award (Academy of American Poets). She is also a MacDowell, Burton House, and Doris McCarthy Fellow
Robin Richardson is known for unsympathetic, concise, and unflinching work that sits in the dark corners of the human condition and distills into beauty what so many turn away from in fear. Read her essay in The Unsympathetic Voice in Poetry in North American Review (University of Iowa)
“Sympathetic and unsympathetic voice is about intent: whom and what one is writing for. It is what separates the likably mediocre from the uncomfortably moving.”
After 15 years as a poet and teacher, Robin decided to dedicate herself to the No Hold School of poetics as a way to equip and empower others to write with awkward brilliance what is begging to be written
Robin will not hold your hand, but she will hold you to a standard that unlocks hidden genius while the old self turns to goop and fuels your rise