In this workshop we will be discussing the following poems and their differing approaches to the writing of place, memory and being in the landscape.

Lynette Roberts, ‘Crossed and Uncrossed’

Tom Raworth, ‘Landscaping the Future’

Allen Fisher, extracts from Place

Maggie O’Sullivan extracts from Murmur

Writing:

During the workshop we carried out a number of durational writing exercises of between 5 – 10 minutes each in response to different aspects of the poems above.

Selected Examples:

Write for 10 minutes about returning to a familiar place that is not as you remember it.

Consider Roberts’s use of verbs at the beginnings of lines. Can you incorporate this technique into your own writing?

Consider the relationship that each poet has to the personal pronoun? What effect does it have on the poem when it is unfixed? Experiment with the use of pronouns in your own writing and consider the implications for the whole poem…

Consider Raworth’s very particular attention to nouns, repetition, words denoting positionality  and  his use of compound words. How could these features be made present in your own work?

Consider the relationship of the body in both O’Sullivan and Fisher’s work. How do you write the body in relation to your chosen site?

How can temporality be enacted within a poem?

Adam Chodzko’s work   Transmitters  (adverts in Loot (1991)) repurposes the site of the newspaper and its classified section in ways that unfix our expectations of use and value. How might you write a poem for a site other than the page? How might it unfix the anticipated expectations of meaning and functionality that surround that site?