How do poets and visual artists depict flowers? ? In this workshop we’ll journey through the floral kingdom, reading inspiring poems and looking at images of artworks to guide us into writing playful in-depth poems about flowers and their strange sex lives.
The Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang made sky gardens from fireworks. Can we talk to a rose as Mei-mei Berssenbrugge does in her book Hello, the Roses? If a poet imagines the rose answering back, as Berssenbrugge and Jo Shapcott do in their sequences, what might it say? Van Gogh’s sunflowers seem to bloom forever, while Ai Weiwei filled Tate Modern’s turbine hall with fired sunflower seeds. Anselm Kiefer painted canvases with ‘mute’ meadows and Monet’s waterlilies look as if they have just burst from buds.
What creature pollinates a giant waterlily in the Amazon? Does it help to imagine it as an abused woman, as the rainforest is raszd? Does metaphor help us understand ephemeral and endangered blossoms as bees are disappearing?
Pascale Petit was born in Paris and lives in Cornwall. She is of French, Welsh, and Indian heritage. Her eighth collection of poetry, Tiger Girl (Bloodaxe, 2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and for Wales Book of the Year. Her seventh, Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe, 2017) won the inaugural Laurel Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Four previous collections were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Salt published her debut novel My Hummingbird Father in 2024, and her ninth collection, Beast, will be published by Bloodaxe in April 2025.
Date: Saturday 22 February 2025, 1–4pm UK
Location: Online
Cost: £25
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