Description
Welcome to Button University!
Sign up today for Patrick Roche’s 2026 Multi-Week Workshop!
Patrick is the author of the poetry collection, A SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE BREAKDOWN
Taking It Persona-lly
Join us on a deep dive into persona poems! How can writing as someone (or something!) else help us learn more about ourselves, our writing, the world, and beyond? Sometimes the key to unlocking your own voice is to try on another one!
Regarding her work on “What Was I Made For?” for the Barbie film, Billie Eilish described her experience with persona writing: “I did not think about myself once in the writing process. I was purely inspired by this movie and this character and the way I thought she would feel, and wrote about that. And then . . . I was like, girl, how did this . . . like I’m writing for myself and I don’t even know it!”
Together, we will explore all of the possibilities that a persona poem can unlock for a reader, audience, and a writer. In each class, we will tackle exercises intended to guide us in crafting a voice for different personae. We will read/listen to/watch/enjoy different examples of persona writing in poetry, music, and more before we analyze them as a group. Then the week’s lesson will culminate in some writing time using a selection of prompts before we reconvene and share our work!
Class day and time:
Sundays in December
2:00pm CT | Dec 06 – Dec 27, 2026
Class Length: 4 weekly sessions
Class Duration: 2 hours via Zoom
Check out their past workshops:
Water, Earth, Fire, Air: Elemental Poetry
For centuries, different cultures around the world had widely agreed on four classical elements that explained the world and everything in it: Water, Earth, Fire, and Air (with Aether as an occasional fifth, but it’s a 4-week course, y’all). But what elements make up your writing?
Building off of this longstanding fascination with the elements – and love for a certain acclaimed animated television series – we will explore how these elements apply to poetry and what our poetry would look like if it were composed of them. Typically, each week we’ll focus on one element as we read and discuss works that exemplify it, while tackling writing exercises to complement the discussion. We will then put it all together with some writing prompts and reconvene for feedback and further discussion.
Maybe you’ve written a poem about fire, but have you written a Fire Poem? What would your writing look like if you built it from Earth? What can Water offer you as a writer? How can your poetry breathe in the Air more deeply? Come join us as we answer all these questions and more!
Poetry with a Pop (Culture)
Pop culture and the media we enjoy can surround our daily lives and color how we view the world, how we understand our reference points for narrative, and how we connect with one another. In this workshop, we will focus on writing poems that engage with different forms or sources of pop culture and media each week: film/television, music, literature, celebrity culture.
For each class, we will tackle some preliminary writing exercises before diving into poems/songs/clips/performances that relate to the topic at hand, analyzing and discussing them as a group. Then we synthesize it all into some prompts that we use for writing and sharing our work. We will also focus on peer editing and workshopping our poems in more detail in the later weeks.
Join us and find out how bringing some pop culture into your poetry can inject tons of fun into the process – and maybe help you see your favorite show or song in a new light, or let it shine new light on you!
Note: If you are gifting a Button U workshop, you MUST enter the recipients email address into the “Gift Message” field while checking out.
Have questions? Visit the Button Workshop FAQ page or contact support@buttonpoetry.com
About Patrick Roche
Patrick Roche is an award-winning poet, mental health advocate, and Carly Rae Jepsen enthusiast from New Jersey. Videos of Patrick’s work have amassed 9 million views on YouTube, making him one of the most popular spoken word poets…. MORE
