Winter Words: Poetry Workshops and Salons

We are delighted to collaborate with the Adelaide Hills Council again in 2021 to present four poetry events, two workshops and two salons:

• On 30 July 2021, Heather Taylor-Johnson will present the salon Poetry of the Body:

Virginia Woolf said that “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has not words for the shiver and the headache.” So how does a poet capture what the body experiences during bouts of serious illness and pain? This poverty of language must be overcome if we’re to tell our stories, normalise differently-abled bodies, and make visible the 50% of the population who live with chronic health issues. The personal is political; let our swords be our words.

• On 9 August 2021, Rachael Mead will present the workshop Poetry in a Precarious World:

This workshop explores how poetry can help make sense of what is happening to our planet and the landscapes we call home. Create poems that respond to the precarious world we find ourselves in by interweaving attention to the natural world with ecological and political observation.

• On 13 August 2021, Rachael Mead will also present the salon Can Poetry Change the World:

English poet W.H. Auden said “poetry changes nothing”, but can the art and act of writing poetry have political or social impact? Is Auden right, or does poetry hold the potential to transform the world? Participants will explore this theme and discuss various answers to the questions posed. Presented by Rachael Mead

• On 21 August 2021, Amelia Walker will present the workshop Ecopoetic Encounters:

Create your own ecopoem that explores encounters with beyond-human entities in order to reflect more deeply on our own human vulnerabilities, and then experiment further with the use of space. Participants will be invited (but not required) to share and discuss their own poems and/or selected ecopoems from online journals, and to reflect on ecopoetry’s relationships to ideas about vulnerability, connection and collaboration from Brené Brown’s The Power of Vulnerability and Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking.