Is it the sea you hear in me?: Speaking with Trees
Event Details
Dr Polly Atkin
In this poetry workshop we will explore the idea of speaking with and through trees. Taking William Wordsworth’s inscription poems as a model, we’ll make our own inscriptions for trees around the Wordsworth Grasmere site, and think about what is mean to try and catch tree-ness in a poem. We’ll read some contemporary poems that speak from and about trees in different ways, from Sylvia Plath to Jason Allen-Paisant, asking what it might mean to think tree-thoughts in tree-time, and how we can bring the wood-wide web into our writing, and our writing to the wood-wide web.
This is part of the Literary Arboretum day of free events at Wordsworth Grasmere.
Reserve your free spot for this event here.
About the speaker
Polly Atkin is a multi-award-winning writer, essayist and poet. She is the author of the poetry collections Basic Nest Architecture, which won a Northern Writers’ Award, and Much With Body, which was longlisted for the Laurel Prize, as well as Recovering Dorothy, the first biography to focus on Dorothy Wordsworth’s later life and illness. A strong advocate for the need for more disabled voices in the publishing industry, Polly co-founded the Open Mountain initiative at Kendal Mountain Festival, which seeks to centre voices that are currently at the margins of outdoor, mountain and nature writing. Born in Nottingham, Polly lives in Grasmere, Cumbria.
About the project
This event is funded by the University of Derby and is affiliated with the collaborative project Romantic Trees: The Literary Arboretum, 1740-1840, led by Dr Amanda Blake Davis and Dr Anna Burton.
Image: Joseph Wright of Derby, Lake Scene (1790) oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Michael D. Coe, Yale MAH 1968 in memory of Sophie D. Coe, B2004.16.
