2024 Lineup

The underworld contains many mysteries, from known unknowns, to unknown unknowns – from hidden mycorrhizal networks to slow processes of decomposition. In this workshop, we invite participants into dark, damp, and heady landscapes. We consider how poetry might allow us to expand beyond our sensory perception, and create new encounters with the worlds under our feet. What kinds of conversations are we having on the page, and how might poems allow us to shift the ways we view the natural world, reframing subject and object? Above and below?

With a focus on ecologies, groundwork, concealed networks, and myth-making, Ella Duffy will explore both human and more-than-human archetypes – particularly those which might manifest beneath the surface. Magma 88: Underworld will be published in March 2024. Curated by Kate Simpson, Editor of Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency.

We will explore the challenges and adaptations these wonderful beings undergo in response to environmental shifts. In this workshop we will gain compelling metaphors and insights on the significant interplay between the personal and ecological, helping us craft our own resonating verses.

If you’re aged 25 or younger, we want to hear from you, too! Bring a poem and arrive early to sign up for our open mic. And join the community! We invite you to stay on afterwards for free refreshments and a chance to meet other young poetry lovers and find out more about Young Poets Network!

As a Poetry Pharmacist I have had many years of administering to the terrible afflictions that beset many writers, both at the start of their writing lives and that often return, like scabies, to irritate and bring dismay even in well-established writing careers.

This session may ask you to step outside, both literally and figuratively, from what you’re already doing now. If taken as advised, it will assist with developing habits of noticing, of becoming habitually and intuitively creative, to come at your work slant and to practice self-care.

Whether that be carnivals, dancehalls, in music settings, food, home or in nature. At the end of it all we want to be able to affirm “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard…”

Panel Discussion with Seán Hewitt, Ella Duffy, Romalyn Ante, Rishi Dastidar, and Emma Must. Chaired by Kate Simpson.

Earth is rapidly becoming a biodiversity deficit. The illusions of civilisation, progress, and choice are crumbling around us, and we are out of time. But we are also existing outside of time, divided between two states – two modes – of panic and complacency, depending on our conceptual reckoning. This session brings together the editor and a selection of award-winning poets from the seminal anthology, Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency (Valley Press, 2021), for a selection of readings and reflections on ecopoetics.

Audiences will be taken on a journey through various emotional states and poetic responses to them, from images of emergency and grief to forms of transformation and work, right through to the question of re-wilding. As we attempt to address our own cognitive dissonance – as poets, as readers, as citizens – in what ways can the page be radically ecological? Be a form of linguistic and empathic activism? Be a way to relocate ourselves in time?

A FREE Young Poets Takeover workshop for 11-18 year olds.

Join poet Liz Berry for a playful, practical session about writing joy and how our happiest poems can help us explore and express the things we really care about. NB This workshop will contain material and exercises suitable for an 11-18 age group.

If you’re younger than 11 and want to take part please contact cmangat@poetrysociety.org.uk to organise parental consent.

‘Sometimes I like to hide in the word foxgloves – in the middle of foxgloves. The xgl is hard to say, out of the England, out of its harbouring word.’ Zaffar Kunial has been widely revered for his deconstructions of words: deconstructions of sound and meaning. Where the words ‘climate’, and ‘crisis’ have become muddied, homogenised, over-used – and ultimately, ignored – how can finding precision in poetry, in the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ of vocabularies, offer us a form of radical, ecological attention?

In this inventive workshop, we will listen, intently, to syllables: to the building blocks of language. Kunial invites us to look again at the places we think we know – the words we think we know – and create new pathways for ourselves. England’s Green was published with Faber in 2022. Curated by Kate Simpson, Editor of Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency.

Award-winning writer Hannah Silva performs material from her experimental memoir, My Child, the Algorithm, a exploration of queer single parenting and love, in conversation with an AI algorithm and a toddler.

As Hannah navigates friendship, dating and life as a queer single parent in London, her toddler and the algorithm contribute humour, play and insight. With the help/disruption of these unreliable narrators, Hannah deconstructs her story, and constructs a new one.

She unravels everything she has been taught to want, finding alternative ways of thinking, loving and parenting today. Queer, creative, sexy and compassionate, My Child, the Algorithm is non-fiction at its finest.

This year’s Saturday evening headline features three incredible poets, all giants in their way on the contemporary UK and world poetry scene. We’re thrilled to be hosting a rare UK appearance from Nicole Sealey whose most recent two collections have been recently published by Bloodaxe. An extract from Nicole’s The Ferguson Report An Erasure won The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2021.

Joining Denise are Rebecca Goss and Alice Hiller. Rebecca’s newest collection Latch (Carcanet, 2023) follows 2019s Girl and the Forwards shortlisted Her Birth (Carcanet, 2023). Alice’s debut full collection, Bird of Winter (Pavilion, 2021) was shortlisted for Best First Collection at the Forwards in the same year. Hosting these three amazing poets for readings and discussion is Jo Bell, renowned poet and co-author of How to be a Poet (Nine Arches Press, 2017).