Spread the word!

Do not underestimate the power of poetry, says Pembroke Fellow and Member of the English Faculty Dr Mark Wormald – as he helps launch a new project encouraging people across the city to compose verse in the name of climate action.

“Ted Hughes said that fishermen and poets carry a biological dynamo around in their heads which enables them to notice things,” says Mark. “He also argued that the trouble with environmental debate is that it breeds more debate, more political brochures, and promises that go nowhere – they just feed into themselves. But if we can find the right language, to touch the heart, then change can happen as swiftly as it needs to.”

The Elemental Poetry Cambridge project aims to find that language – and produce five annual anthologies full of it. And anyone, of any age, with a connection to Cambridge can be a part of it, by writing poems and prose poems about the elements of our world – water, fire, air, earth, ether – however they experience them.

“Actually committing an insight or emotion to paper or screen, or an observation about the natural world, particularly the natural world in crisis, makes you feel that your imaginative life is richer than it was before you did," says Mark. "These are elements that have been written about for millennia, even if our relationship with some of their meanings have changed. Now we’re more likely to refer to ‘ethernet’ than ‘ether’…”

The Elemental project will run for five years, and has an annual cycle. Peter Carpenter, poet, former teacher, and co-founder with his wife Amanda of the independent poetry publisher Worple Press, will lead a team of experienced writers, including Worple poets Clare Best and Antony Wilson, in delivering a series of free in-person poetry workshops, in the autumn, winter and spring. They will take place at Pembroke College and a range of other venues across Cambridge, including local schools. The first workshop – on the theme Water – was held in October, and more will take place through to May.

And each May, beginning in 2025, submissions of poems and prose poems will be invited, including some that started life in the workshops, for one in a series of themed anthologies to be published by Worple Press. Worple will donate at least 30% of the profits of each anthology to an environmental cause relevant to its themed element: in 2025 Blue Marine will benefit.

“We’ve had a great response already,” says Mark. “And from such a wide range of people, and in many different ways. A College gardener asked me about it, and also the wife of one of our porters got in touch, which was great! She works with some of the local libraries in South Cambridgeshire so we’re going to hold a workshop at one of those. We’ve also had interest from lots of schools across Cambridge, and I’ve spoken to Cambridge students who have never written a poem, or haven’t for years, who are excited to be part of the project.”

Mark – whose book The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes, a meditation on poetry and nature, was published in 2022 – began writing poetry at school and continued while he was a student at Oxford, where he won prizes for his work. When he came to Cambridge he started a poetry group in his study – which he recently discovered was Ted Hughes’ bedroom 40 years earlier, and the setting for a dream that changed Hughes’ course with his poetry, convincing him to switch his studies from English to Anthropology. In the dream he was visited by a burned fox in the small hours, after Hughes had abandoned an essay.  The fox put a bleeding hand on his blank page and told him: ‘Stop this – you are destroying us’.

“It’s that idea that if you are studying literature and poetry in a way that reduces it, that tears it apart – that only analyses it without respecting the life of the imagination from which it proceeds – then you might as well not bother. And that has come to mean something very personal and significant to me.”

Poetry does make things happen, says Mark, referencing WH Auden’s famous line which ironically states the opposite in his poem 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats':

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

“Those lines say poetry makes nothing happen, but then also compare poetry to a river. And a river makes a valley, it cuts this space, and then nourishes communities. So, actually we see that writing poetry doesn’t just help the person who writes it.

“I really love the fact that Elemental Poetry Cambridge is going to reach as many people across the city as possible. If we can produce five annual anthologies of elemental poetry for the planet, literally from Cambridge writers of all ages, it will be an extraordinary, powerful series of statements about our concern for the environment.”

Ted Hughes would, Mark hopes, have approved. The poet lent crucial early support, in Devon and Yorkshire, to the Arvon Foundation – a charity that runs creative writing courses – for which Peter Carpenter has long taught.

Details of how to apply to join Elemental’s Cambridge workshops are included on the Elemental Poetry Cambridge website. Spaces may be limited but specially recorded guidance and writing prompts from the workshops will be available to everyone who applies. So get writing; spread the word!