Workshop: Poetry

Saturday 12 October: 1.00pm – 3.00pm

Poetry Workshop with Brett Dionysius

Much contemporary free verse poetry is written in a ‘lyric’ style that uses a human perspective to try to understand the world (anthropocentrism). This is particularly true when poets write about the environment from their interactions with nature but remain the subject of their poems about our effects on the planet, only using animals, plants and rocks as examples to illustrate the gravity of this relationship.

The goal of this poetry workshop is to write a suite of 3 poems from a non-human perspective – that is from the point of view of an entity – organic or inorganic that is not human. The workshop will provide textual and visual stimuli and creative strategies to enable participants to free up their thinking and re-centre their subject matter from the point of view of creatures and natural objects that don’t traditionally have a ’voice’ in describing the effects of the anthropocene on them.

Considering that in New Zealand some rivers have been given human rights to exist in peace, we need to start to reimagine and engage with non-human perspectives to develop greater sympathy for the natural world.

BOOK TICKETS HERE

Author BIO
Brett Dionysius (aka B. R. Dionysius) is an award-winning poet and was the founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival. His poetry has been widely published in literary journals, anthologies, newspapers and online. He was born in Dalby and has since lived in Melbourne, Brisbane, and Ipswich, where he is an English teacher, and in his spare time watches birds.