Join award-winning poet and Professor David Morley, for this 2-hour poetry workshop exploring ‘negative capability’ as a practical method for writing poetry.

Laurel Prize Chair of Judges David Morley leads a 2 hour generative writing workshop exploring ‘negative capability’ as a practical method for writing poetry: the ability to stay with uncertainty, perception, and not-knowing as a source of form rather than resolving it. We move between early ecological and religious ways of attending to nature, where survival, meaning, and attention were inseparable, and contemporary writing practice. The session includes guided exercises in deep attention, including learning how to bring birds to your hand as a discipline of stillness and perception. We read poems from long ecological time alongside Keats’s idea of remaining ‘in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,’ and his claim that poetry arrives ‘as naturally as leaves to a tree.’ Participants write throughout, supported by slides that move between text, image, and attention exercises, building a practice of writing that emerges rather than is forced.