Isabelle Baafi Workshop - Not to Scale

How big (or rather, small) are we in the universe? How integral to it? How much do our relationships to people and environments shift according to our experience of them? EE Cummings once described a stone as ‘small as a world and as large as alone’. Join Isabelle Baafi in this generative workshop, in which we’ll read poems that explore how we see - and how we are seen by - ideas and beings much smaller/bigger than us. We will discuss perspectives on scale that change how we understand such ideas, how we treat such beings (and each other, and ourselves). We will write poems that interrogate the elasticity of memory and connection, and the relativity of power and grief.

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

Isabelle Baafi is the Reviews Editor at Poetry London. Her pamphlet Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020) won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming inGranta, theTLS, The Poetry Review, Callaloo, The London Magazine,and elsewhere. Her debut collection Chaotic Good is published in 2025 by Faber & Faber and Wesleyan University Press.