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Join us to read, write and explore the place of beauty in poetry today.

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Do you agree that ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’, as Keats said?

For Etel Adnan, the Lebanese-American poet, essayist and painter, “Beauty is an inner sense, it makes us happy... we need it.”

Adnan goes on to observe that “we don't speak about beauty anymore in art... it's démodé - out of fashion.”

What of beauty in poetry today? [How] does beauty speak to our lived experience? What of the un-beautiful? Are beauty of form and beauty of sound still integral to poems we are writing now?

We will consider the place of beauty in our poems, taking inspiration from poets including Kim Hyesoon, Tony Hoagland, Diane Seuss, Fiona Benson, Alice Oswald and Shakespeare.