Insatiable carrot

A collection of visual gardening poetry.Poem featured in International Cinnamon press poetry competition.Several poems exhibiting in Todmorden Market as part of incredible edible Todmorden poet residency.A short account of the research that resulted in the publication of insatiable carrot follows here: In 2013 I undertook several diverse gardening writing residencies in order to investigate how immersion in a particular environment and set of circumstances affects poetry drafted in these contexts, and what synchronicities might be expected between internal and external physical conditions and environment, and poetic output. This built on my research in my monograph, Edward Thomas: the Origins of His Poetry (University of Wales Press, 2012), which examined Thomas’s and my own creative processes so as to identify physical and contextual elements in the poetic composition processes, and the importance of physical and mental displacement accompanied by a flexible ‘divagatory’ attention during creative composition. During the gardening residencies I kept records of drafting and locations. These drafts were developed into a poetry collection, published as insatiable carrot (Cinnamon Press, 2015), which was mainly ordered in terms of visual innovation. The result was chronological. The groups of poems corresponded to the residencies during which they were composed. The two residencies involving the most radical and unconventional gardening practices and providing the greatest challenge to my own belief systems – the Incredible Farm and the Incredible Edible Gift Economy Eco Farm – produced the most innovative poems. These poems were set in hybrid forms and employed methodologies I had never adopted before, involving visual typography and layout in a mixture of textual and visual art, with an emphasis on paratext and threshold.The research shows that different gardening residencies produce different kinds and forms of poem. It also indicates that innovation in poetic form or effect is connected to challenges to the poet’s more habitual ways of thinking and physical experience, and that hybridization, as Bakhtin and Homi Bhaba have posited, tends to occur when ‘a new alliance formulates itself, [for] it may demand that you should translate your principles, rethink them, extend them.’ (Bhabha 1990, 216).Judy Kendall, April 201