Clare Pollard Workshop - On The Subject of Cheese

Flavour can be incredibly evocative - a single mouthful conjuring a person, a place, a moment in time – whilst taste is also often loaded with cultural and class connotations. Having recently written a sequence of poems about cocktails, Clare Pollard wants you to think about your relationship to your diet: about airmiles, alcohol, comfort, indulgence, convenience and disgust. In this workshop we will explore great poems that engage the senses, starting from Baudelaire’s commandment that one must ‘always be drunk’ and proceeding via Chesterton’s assertion that ‘poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese’, whilst hoping to generate lots of delicious ideas to takeaway.

NB Zoom links to the individual workshops will arrive in your inbox 48 hours before each workshop. Please check your junk folder.

Clare Pollard has published five collections of poetry with Bloodaxe, most recently Incarnation, with a sixth The Lives of the Female Poets, out with Bloodaxe in September 2025. Her poem 'Pollen' was nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2022. She has been involved in numerous translation projects - including translating Ovid’s Heroines, which she toured as a one-woman show – and was editor of Modern Poetry in Translation for five years.

Clare featured in a Poetry Translation Centre event at our second festival in 2018 and also ran a workshop on translating poetry at the same festival as well as featuring in last year's zoom workshop series.