‘Stratifying Dialects’: a symposium about environmental memory and poetry

Poetry has always explored the relationship between memory and the environment, but in recent times the concern with what is at risk in our world and what is being lost has become especially urgent. Just as Natalie Diaz has written, a river ‘remembers everything’, so our current environmental crises are also crises of memory. How have poets writing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries documented such loss? How have they made visible the legacies of environmental change and the damage it has done to people and places? When Paul Ricoeur argues that ‘we are indebted to those who have gone before us for part of what we are’, does the same commemorative impulse hold true for the environment? How far are poets indebted to environments for making them what they are and how do they acknowledge this debt?

Taking a broad definition of environmental memory to include the natural and built environments, environments of conflict, and environments of representation, ‘Stratifying Dialects’ will feature presentations and discussions that consider creative practice and academic research. In addition, the event will explore the acoustic possibilities of exploring the relationship between environment and memory, such as how a place remembers or can be remembered through sound.

Everyone is welcome to attend, though spaces are limited. Tickets are free and are for the whole day.

The symposium will take place in the John Henry Brookes Building on Headington Road. More details will be sent to those who register for the event. Lunch and coffee/tea breaks will be provided.