Weather Station: Climate Poetry Writers Room
Led by poet and academic John Wedgwood Clarke, the programme invited three emerging writers to explore how poetry can act as a kind of weather station.
‘A poem is full of hypersensitive measuring devices calibrated to pick up various feelings about the appearance of the first snowdrops, dreams, precise information about changes in the pH of the ocean, and all manner of anxieties entangled with the sometimes hard to comprehend scale of the climate and biodiversity crises.‘
Writers Karen Howse, Holly Boyden and Jackie Taylor spent the week thinking about how poetry could hold wildly different kinds of information together in a mutually illuminating way. They made close readings of canonical and contemporary poems, critical and philosophical texts, their personal experiences and the environment around Bude to help them trace the way the climate and biodiversity crises were shaping our lives. They went out into the local landscape and created new work on this theme.
The poets met filmmaker Jesse Adlam, who created short films of their new work. Alongside the films, the poems were printed on postcards to be handed out at events or sent to friends.
It defeats the whole object of building a castle by Jackie Taylor
Other Lives by Karen Howse
