For Francis Ponge, the French surrealist, essayist and ‘poet of things’, all objects yearn to express themselves… They mutely await the coming of the word so that they may reveal the hidden depts of their being.

We will read poems on a pebble, a candle, a boat, a yellow glove… and we will write our own object poems taking inspiration from poets including Wislawa Szymborska, Charles Simic, Craig Raine, Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein and Naomi Shihab Nye.