The Inkubator is Literary Cleveland’s free annual festival for writers. The festival runs from September 18 - 23 and offers participants a chance to generate new writing, improve craft, and advance careers. The in-person conference at the Cleveland Public Library features writing workshops, panel discussions, craft talks, teen writing programs, a book fair, breakout social spaces, and an afterparty reading and celebration. Register now.

Panel Discussion: Bees, Rocks, Heat, & Garbage: Poetry and the Outside World with Jason Harris, Caryl Pagel, Zach Savich, Robin Beth Schaer, and Lindsay Turner

How can poetry account for the material, daily, or commonplace conditions of the environment in which one lives? How might poetry tether specific ecological conditions or observations to larger questions of choice, worry, weather, community, conservation, extinction, or the nonhuman? This panel will consider what forms and strategies—ode, mess, palimpsest, instruction, somatic, en plein air, fragment, etc.—might serve as useful tools for poets desiring to write about the particulars of place and environmental transformation. We’ll leave you with a list of recommended reading and strategies for composing embodied or in-the-world poems of your own.