Getting poetic at Kenwood
Taking Hampstead Heath and beautiful green spaces as our inspiration, last month Heath Hands ran a series of poetry writing workshops. Each weekend had a different theme, from ekphrastic, to narrative, to list poetry. We used these themes to create writing prompts, crafting our own poetic responses to the Heath’s habitats, its wildlife and history (as well as our own personal stories!).
Writing in response to the natural world (or whatever we might mean by “nature”) has a long and varied history. From the threat to the cedar forest in the epic of Gilgamesh, to the Romantics’ search for the ‘sublime’ in natural settings, to the eco-poets of today.
The Dairy at Kenwood. Our poetry base!
Poetry can highlight details in nature we might miss (it was fun adapting the absurdity of meticulous observations in Christopher Smart’s lengthy 18th century list poem, ‘For I shall consider my cat Jeoffry,’ to the fauna and flora of the Heath). Yet it also changes how we experience these environments, or how we narrate ourselves in relation to the setting. One of the poems we looked at in the workshop focusing on nature and eco-poetry was Gary Snider’s ‘Riprap.’ The opening, “Lay down these words/ Before your mind like rocks”, could be read as a comment on the tension between the poem describing or ‘becoming’ how we perceive the environment.
At the workshop on Ekphrastic poetry (inspired by Wallace’s ‘Giacometti’s Dog’, Keats’s ’Ode to a Grecian urn’, and Auden’s response to Breughel’s painting of the fall of Icarus), we looked at historical photographs and paintings of the Heath to write our own ekphrastic poetry. It was a good opportunity to think about how the Heath has been depicted over time and by different people.
Keats House
The link to Keats is a special one for everyone at Heath Hands, given our management of the gardens at Keats House. If you haven’t visited it’s really worth taking the trip to see the home of Hampstead Heath’s bard.
Visit our events page for more opportunities to learn about the Heath. You can also become a member and stay up to date with the many activities we have on offer and enjoy all our activities for free. For more ways to creatively help Hampstead Heath, find books about the Heath, artworks and more at our shop.
Poetry writing on the grass
Some wildflower inspiration
