Poetry Wales Online Workshop Ticket 22 August 2020 w/ Marvin Thompson

Description

Online workshop via Zoom, 2pm – 4.30pm: Eco Poetry: the Political and the Personal with Marvin Thompson

‘My soul has grown deep like the rivers.’ – Langston Hughes

We live in a time when a lack PPE has led to suffering in British care homes, when officials have been slow to offer reasons for the disproportionate BAME deaths due to Covid-19, when the term BAME has been used to hide the lack of Black representation in government, when the Washington NFL team has been forced to change its insulting name and when a plaque that honoured a slave trader has been removed from Britain’s beloved Brecon. With all these events in mind, I have asked myself: who needs eco poetry? My answer: we all do!

In this open and inclusive workshop, we will generate poems that connect our natural environment (Swansea’s seagulls, Rotherham’s roadside thistles, Siberia’s wildfires…) to our personal politics and our personal lives. We will take inspiration from eco poems written by a range of poets. This range of cultural and social perspectives will challenge our ideas of what eco poetry is, what political poetry could be and what personal poetry might be. The poems that we create during and after this workshop will connect us more deeply to our environment and to ourselves.

Author bio:

Marvin Thompson was born in Tottenham, north London to Jamaican parents. He now lives in mountainous south Wales. His debut collection, Road Trip (Peepal Tree Press, March 2020), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

In 2019, he was one of only eight writers to be awarded a grant by Literature Wales as part of the Platforming Under-represented Writers Funding Scheme. His war poem, ‘The Many Reincarnations of Gerald, Oswald Archibald Thompson’ was submitted by Long Poem Magazine for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Poem.

As well as having an MA in creative writing, Thompson was selected by Nine Arches Press for the Primers 2 mentoring scheme. Reviewers of the anthology described his work as ‘exciting,’ ‘dramatic’ and ‘a virtuoso performance.’