As Easily as Leaves to a Tree: A Workshop in Negative Capability with David Morley

Join award-winning poet and Professor David Morley, for this 2-hour poetry workshop exploring 'negative capability' as a practical method for writing poetry.

Laurel Prize Chair of Judges David Morley leads a 2 hour generative writing workshop exploring ‘negative capability’ as a practical method for writing poetry: the ability to stay with uncertainty, perception, and not-knowing as a source of form rather than resolving it. We move between early ecological and religious ways of attending to nature, where survival, meaning, and attention were inseparable, and contemporary writing practice. The session includes guided exercises in deep attention, including learning how to bring birds to your hand as a discipline of stillness and perception. We read poems from long ecological time alongside Keats’s idea of remaining ‘in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,’ and his claim that poetry arrives ‘as naturally as leaves to a tree.’ Participants write throughout, supported by slides that move between text, image, and attention exercises, building a practice of writing that emerges rather than is forced.

1 x session, running 11am–1pm (BST), on 26 Sept 2026. This workshop will take place at University of Salford, Media City Campus, Manchester M50 2HE.

For more information on this year’s ceremony please visit The Laurel Prize 2026.

Image Credit: @emre-bilgic

Questions & Accessibility

If you have any questions, wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, or require any form of adjustment to access our courses and workshops, please email [email protected].

About David Morley View Profile

David Morley is the author of FURY, a Poetry Book Society Choice and Forward Prize finalist; and winner of the Ted Hughes Award for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems. His other collections from Carcanet Press include Passion, The Magic of What’s There, The Gypsy and the Poet and The Invisible Kings, both Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Originally trained as a zoologist, he researched acid rain in the tarns of the Lake District, a deep engagement with the natural world that informs his poetry. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the chair of the judges for the 2026 Laurel Prize.

The Poetry School