Byron Writers Festival – Plant a poem and watch it grow

Byron Writers Festival (4-6 August) has partnered with Red Room Poetry to create a series of beautiful seed cards featuring poems by local Byron Shire poet Lisa Brockwell. For the duration of the Festival, guests at Elements Resort will find the poetic seed cards on their pillows and will be able to plant the cards back home to grow their own poetic gardens. The seed cards will also be distributed to patrons at a Festival session entitled Sound and Soundscapes: Making Language Sing featuring Lisa Brockwell, biologist David Haskell (The Song of Trees) and performance poet Miles Merrill (Sunday 6 August).

“We’re thrilled to be partnering with Red Room Poetry, a company that brings poetry into our everyday lives in inventive and beautiful ways as well as nurturing Australian poets,” said Festival Director Edwina Johnson.

Red Room Poetry creates poetic projects and learning programs in collaboration with a spectrum of poets, schools, communities and partners. The Byron Writers Festival seed cards are part of New Shoots, a program that celebrates and cultivates poems inspired by plants and place to deepen creative and cultural connections with nature.

Red Room Poetry commissioned local poet Lisa Brockwell to write a series of poems inspired by the beautiful natural surrounds of Elements of Byron where the Festival is situated. The seed cards contain Callistemon Citrinus (Lemon-scented bottlebrush) seeds, a coastal plant found growing on the Festival site.

A long hallway
of green carpet
then a shadow
of something darker
where the hinterland looms
and mountains swell

~ Lisa Brockwell, excerpt from ‘End Note’

“Lisa Brockwell is a highly regarded, well known poet from the Byron Bay area,” said Tamryn Bennett “Her poems explore deep connections with local environment of Byron and so makes her an ideal choice for this collaboration growing seeded poems.”

Lisa Brockwell was born in Sydney, spent a large part of her adult life in England, and now lives on a rural property near Byron Bay with her husband and young son. She was runner-up in the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize in 2015, and has been shortlisted for the Australian Catholic University, Newcastle, Montreal International and Bridport Poetry Prizes. Her poems have been published in The Spectator, Australian Love Poems, The Canberra Times and Best Australian.

ancient presence,
the old god we don’t want to wake,
navel of this place,
anchoring
every stitch
in this tapestry.

~ Lisa Brockwell, excerpt from ‘End Note’

At Byron Writers Festival Lisa Brockwell will be conducting the workshop Poetry: deeper reading for better writing (Tuesday 1st August) and in Festival session Sound and Soundscapes: Making Language Sing with biologist David Haskell (The Song of Trees), chaired by performance poet Miles Merrill (Sunday 6 August). For full program go to byronwritersfestival.com

Byron Writers Festival – OPENS NEXT WEEK!
4-6 August
Tickets available at
byronwritersfestival.com