Professor Harriet Tarlo Inaugural Lecture – Ecopoetic experiments with place, people and form: Can poetry help us engage with our changing world?

Wednesday 19th April 2023, 18:00-20:00

In this interactive lecture, Professor Harriet Tarlo will explore the ways in which it is possible to engage creatively with landscape, environment and the more‐than‐human world. In essence, the theme is collaboration with people and place. Working with people such as other artists, environmental groups, students, and the wider public is an important part of her creative life. She will reflect on the pleasures of this, but also the necessity to acknowledge the urgency of climate change, mass extinction, and environmental degradation.

Collaboration with the more‐than‐human world, the birds, plants, weather, and forms of land and water that surround us is one of the challenges of ecopoetics, which can be defined as poetry and critical work that engages with the environment and ecological issues in radical ways. An example of this might be to avoid the anthropocentric lyric ‘I’ in favour of more experimental forms that allow the voices of the landscape to emerge. Harriet will discuss her long-term interest in such experimental ecopoetic forms and her conviction that these come closest to embodying landscape and to challenging the preconceptions and misconceptions which have led us to our current crisis. She will talk about how such work can reach wider publics, in particular via exhibitions and workshops such as those she has held with her collaborator, Judith Tucker. Here, in another kind of experiment, word and image work together to convey place, but also to allow space for audiences to enter the conversation.

Above all, Harriet’s work has always been a celebration of the local environments with which she has engaged, and her talk will include some readings from her poetry to demonstrate this, and to further explore all the points above. There will be an invitation to join in with the event by writing your own ecopoetic work, with guidance of course.

Speaker Bio

Professor Harriet Tarlo is the author of eight single-author poetry publications with Shearsman Press, Etruscan books and, most recently, Cut Flowers (2021) with Guillemot Press. She has collaborated for ten years with the artist Judith Tucker, exhibiting widely here and abroad and publishing five artists’ books with Wild Pansy Press, the latest being Saltwort (2022). Her anthology on radical landscape poetry, The Ground Aslant (2011) is a key text in the field, and she had edited special features on women and ecopoetics for How2 Vol 3:2 (2008), on ecopoetics for Plumwood Mountain Vol 4:1 (2017) on cross-disciplinary environmental art for Green Letters Vol 23:3 (2019). She is the author of numerous essays for academic publications and journals such as Jacket, Sociologia Ruralis and Critical Survey. She has worked extensively on projects which both celebrate local places and engage with environmental concerns, most recently, with geographer Jon Bridge and the Wildlife Trust, on the AHRC-funded Hydrospheres (the local river/reservoir network), with scientist Nicola Hemmings, on Royal Society-funded project, Every Bird a Nest, and, with Judith Tucker, on Arts Council-funded Hideaway (the Lincolnshire saltmarsh).