Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre is excited to announce 'Stratifying Dialects': a critical-creative symposium about the relationship between environmental memory and poetry that will be taking place at Oxford Brookes University on Wednesday 7 May 2025 from 10am-4.30pm.
Poetry has always explored the relationship between memory and the environment, but in recent times the concern with what is at risk in our world and what is being lost has become especially urgent.
Just as Natalie Diaz has written, a river ‘remembers everything’, so our current environmental crises are also crises of memory. How have poets writing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries documented such loss? How have they made visible the legacies of environmental change and the damage it has done to people and places?
When Paul Ricoeur argues that ‘we are indebted to those who have gone before us for part of what we are’, does the same commemorative impulse hold true for the environment? How far are poets indebted to environments for making them what they are and how do they acknowledge this debt?
We're delighted to be hosting a number of poets, academics, and sound artists for a mixture of talks, readings, and presentations that will discuss these questions: Clare Brant (who will provide our keynote talk), Susie Campbell, Hannah Copley, Claire Cox, Jen Gallagher, Wendy Pratt, Denise Saul, Charlotte Shevchenko Knight, Kay Syrad, and Paul Whitty.
The symposium is open to all and is free to attend. Since places are limited, please only register if you can commit to the whole day.
Date: Wednesday 7 May 2025 from 10am-4.30pm
Location: Oxford Brookes University
Cost: Free
If you would like to join us, please sign up via Eventbrite where you can find more information about the event.