In this workshop, Gamilaroi poet Luke Patterson will guide participants through a series of writing exercises that develop techniques of poetic compression, expansion, distillation, and dis/placement. These techniques will be applied to the development of land-based metaphors, with the aim of writing poems and poetic fragments that explore the process of literally and literarily Thinking-thru-Country.

Ecopoetry is sometimes mischaracterized as the effacement of the poet/speaker’s ‘I’ from the landscape. However, in this workshop, Country, place, and the ‘local’ will be raised as ideal lenses to examine the subjective self. Participants will be asked to consider not what we as humans project onto the landscape, but rather to recognize the cultures we have adopted from sentient landscapes.