Jay Gao Workshop – Writing Trees & Arboreal Poetics

In this workshop we will explore how poets have responded to the verdant variousness of trees. We will think about trees ecologically, but also consider how trees might define limits of poetic thought, image and form – ways of writing otherwise about trees and woods. Learning from poets including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Francis Ponge, C.D. Wright, Jason Allen-Paisant, and Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo, we will stumble through the dense woods of language together, learning to draw upon our relationship with trees in order to write into a poetics of the arboreal.