Poetry for the Planet Night
- drjohnsonshouse
- Jun 1
- 2 min read
Thursday 26 June
6pm - 8pm
£15 (booking fee)
In celebration of London Climate Action Week and the Fleet Street Quarter Climate Festival, an evening of poetry and creative reflection at the historic venue Dr Johnson’s House.
In celebration of London Climate Action Week and the Fleet Street Quarter Climate Festival, join us for a fundraising evening of poetry and creative reflection at the historic venue Dr Johnson’s House, a house of words, with readings from Julian Bishop, Jemma Borg and Jacqueline Saphra - all members of Poets for the Planet, a community of kindred poets, performers, artists and creative activists raising their voices to engage with climate and ecological emergency through poetry in all its forms.
Doors will open at 6pm and a Welcome Talk will be offered at 6.15pm with the museum curator about Dr Johnson’s life at Gough Square. You will then be treated to a small but specially selected display of highlights from the library collection, including a rare first edition of Johnson’s satirical poem ‘London’, written not long after his arrival in London and in response to his first impressions of the urban sprawl (1737).
The poetry readings from 7pm will be explorations of our beautiful natural world, our devastated planet, and the feelings that arise when we engage with our precarious situation on Planet Earth: grief, despair and the hope of recovery.
In conversation with Jacqueline Saphra, the poets will discuss ways in which the tools - emotional and intellectual - that poetry provides, can allow us as poets and as listeners and readers to fully engage with the issues around climate change and nature loss.
The audience will be invited to explore their own responses to the climate emergency by putting pen to paper.
This event is strictly limited to 50 tickets. Ticket price includes 1 drink.
50% of the proceeds from ticket sales will go to Dr Johnson’s House, a charitable foundation, and 50% will go to Client Earth, a team of lawyers and policy experts dedicated to protecting life on Earth.
About the Poets
Julian Bishop has had a lifelong interest in ecology and worked for a time as Environment Reporter for BBC Wales. His first book of poems about the climate emergency We Saw It All Happen was published in January 2023. A former runner-up in the Ginkgo Prize for Eco Poetry, he’s won many prizes in competitions and been widely published in poetry magazines, most recently in Magma, The Morning Star, XR’s Rebel Talk, Riptide Journal and Finished Creatures magazine.
Jemma Borg was an evolutionary geneticist and has worked in research, publishing and the voluntary sector. Her second collection, Wilder (Pavilion, 2022), was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, was a Laurel Prize winner and included poems that won the RSPB/Rialto Nature and Place Competition and the inaugural Ginkgo Prize. She lives in East Sussex and has recently been commissioned to write about the High Weald National Landscape
Jacqueline Saphra is a poet, playwright, agitator and teacher of creative writing, author of ten plays, four chapbooks and five poetry collections. Her collection, All My Mad Mothers was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and she is a founder member of Poets for the Planet.
