Intercapillary Places

Reading from his poetry, Peter Larkin will offer a ‘dense phenomenological incitement of trees’, engaging with the sense of mystery arising from trees, edge-lands and hinterlands. John Milbank will give a talk on ‘The Eight Diagonals’ of poetry with the aim of locating this mystery within a philosophical framework. The talk will argue that earth’s organic crust is thin, and, thinner still, there is a ‘spiritual crust’, which breaks through the organic in a series of ‘poetic’ diagonals, from culture to justice.

Peter Larkin’s three collections of poetry are Terrain Seed Scarcity, (2001), Leaves of Field (2006) and Lessways Least Scarce Among (2012). He has contributed to The Ground Aslant: an Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (2011) and published a book of academic essays, Wordsworth & Coleridge: Promising Losses in 2012. An interview with Edmund Hardy is available at Intercapillary Space and another has appeared (with Matthew Hall) on Cordite.

John Milbank is a theologian and poet. His works of theology and philosophy include The Word Made Strange (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and his collaboration with Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (MIT, 2009). His work has developed a political and social theology. His poetry has been collected in The Legend of Death (Cascade, 2008).

Image: Courtesy of Edmund Hardy