NASN has secured funding from Arts Council England to deliver a new series of seminar/workshops. Under the title Dialogues, this innovative sequence will begin in April 2011 until April 2012, with a culminating event to close the series. The seminars are free to attend and will take place in Leeds Metropolitan University, The Lit & Phil Society in Newcastle and other venues based in the North.

UPCOMING PROGRAMME:

Monday 1st August at The Lit & Phil Society, Newcastle at 5.30pm
Led by Vicky Paine. Is there a dialogue between science and poetry?

Poets can engage with science in their work, but can this be anything more productive than poets using science as a reservoir of images and ideas? Do poets have anything to offer scientists? Scientists rely on metaphor to both construct and communicate their ideas and poetry is one of foremost ways of foregrounding layers of meaning in metaphors. We will look at poems including ‘Mapping the Genome’ by Michael Symmons Roberts (from his collection Corpus, 2004) to consider what happens when scientific metaphors are transferred into poetry. The final part of the seminar will allow participants to choose a scientific metaphor and do a creative writing exercise, trying to draw out the resonances and implications that scientific discourse may try to disregard. Examples could include ‘crashing’ computers, ‘selfish’ genes and disease as ‘invasion’. Is poetry able to reawaken scientific metaphor and draw our attention to the implications and assumptions of scientific language?

Venue details: http://www.litandphil.org.uk/visit.shtml