Hope is the Only Option: Four Ways into Nature Poetry 

Engage with nature poetry through four different routes: documentation, resistance, nature as solace, and imagined alternative futures.

* This course will take place on the video-conferencing platform ZOOM *

In this workshop we will explore four different routes through nature poetry – documentation, resistance, nature as solace, and imagined alternative futures – as exemplified by poems by Mary Oliver, Gary Snyder, Seamus Heaney, and Wendell Berry. We will take part in generative writing exercises, consider what Selima Hill calls ‘paying attention as a radical act’ and ask what nature poetry can do beyond elegy and lament. We will also look at how hope is a legitimate response to the challenges facing our natural world and explore these four distinct ways of putting that into practice. 

Participants will leave with new drafts and a wider sense of what’s available to them when they sit down to write about the living world. The workshop draws on ideas explored in Ben Verinder’s pamphlets We Lost the Birds and How to Save a River , as well as during his year as Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year.  

1-off Zoom session at 6.30–9.00pm (BST on Tuesday 8th September)

Concessions & Accessibility

To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here.

What to Expect

This course is part of The September Sessions: 10 Years of the MA in Writing in Poetry, a series of Zoom workshops celebrating 10 Years of our MA in Writing in Poetry programme. Check out the full line up here.

More information about how our Video Courses work can be found on the Video Courses page. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected]. 

Image Credit: Yunus Tuğ

About Ben Verinder View Profile

Ben Verinder lives in rural Hertfordshire. He holds an MA in Writing Poetry from The Poetry School and Newcastle University. He is the 2024/5 Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year. 

His poems have been published widely, including in The Rialto, Stand, Lighthouse, The North, Black Iris, And Other Poems, and Wild Court. His debut pamphlet, Botanicals, was published by Frosted Fire in 2021 and his second, We Lost The Birds, by Nine Pens in 2023. In 2022 Ben won the Bournemouth International Writing Prize and his poems have won, been shortlisted for, or commended in, a wide variety of competitions. In 2023 he was commissioned by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations to write a poem to mark its 75th anniversary. He is the biographer of the adventurer and writer Mary Burkett. 

"The courses immerse me in different styles, concerns, and literary and social contexts. They give me a wider perspective and understanding of my own poetry and that of others, and allow me to experiment and learn what I'd be hard pressed to discover on my own."

- Spring 2026 Survey Response