Alarms and Excursions is a poetry and performance collective, founded by Isabel White in 2009. Each year we mount three or four provocations on a variety of themes, featuring poetry, spoken word, dance, classical and popular music, theatre, art and food. With decades of experience between us, our team includes: Emma Drury O’Rourke; Anna Drysdale; James Hodgson; Cassie Mathews; Robin Pilcher; Steve Tasane; Sabina Virtosu; Irène Wernli; Isabel White; Lou Yates; Rosemary Yung. You can hear some of us here: https://www.alarmsandexcursions.com/gallery/

It used to be easy to define poetry. You just needed a few daffodils, a starving aesthete in a garret dying of consumption, and the opportunity to go somewhere and wander about a lot. Now there is the threat of open warfare in the poetry world, where the ‘spoken worders’ don’t get the ‘on the pagers’ and vice versa. To rhyme or not to rhyme, that could be the question.

Before we get to exchanging ink pellets across the lecture hall floor I think we first of all need to understand what poetry is – a concept that increasingly defies definition. So, this session is concerned precisely with that – coming up with a definition of poetry that will satisfy everyone. Easy peasy. After that we can begin to measure and debate the legitimacy of all sides of the argument.

This session is open to fishermen, midwives, shopkeepers, chimney sweeps, football pundits, anyone in fact that has an opinion on this. It is also open to musicians and artists and, reluctantly, to poets, though they are not encouraged, as they will bring too much baggage with them and start spouting on about stuff.