Folk Horror in Poetry

The relationship between organised human life and the rest of nature is more strained by the day. How can we use folk horror as a lens to interrogate and write about nature in revolt, about beastliness, about alternate ecologies? How can we draw on mythic and folkloric literary traditions to explore the bounds of the human, the shape of the climate crisis, and the strange experience of embodiment? How can the folk horror imaginary enrich our writing?

“Your eyes are dark as holly / Of sycamore your horns / Your bones are made of elder branch, Your teeth are made of thorns.”
Charles Causley, Green Man in the Garden

“one damp steak/ hung outside from the porch/ whistling in the streaked and furious night”
Rebecca Tamás, A spell for sex

"The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass / And silent was the flock in woolly fold" 
John Keats, St Agnes Eve

“But now I wonder: better to be the egg or scaled/ mandible? The small hand or the flies, bottle black/ and green, spilling their bile onto whatever’s left”
Donika Kelly, A Dead Thing That, in Dying, Feeds the Living

“All the charms Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!”
William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“Dead Papa Toothwort wakes from his standing nap an acre wide and scrapes off dream dregs of bitumen glistening thick with liquid globs of litter.”
Max Porter, Lanny

Eleanor Penny is a writer, journalist, broadcaster and teacher. Her writing has been featured in the New Statesman, the Independent, In These Times Magazine. Prizes for her work include a London Writers Award, a TS Eliot Emerging Writers Fellowship, the Verve Poetry Festival Prize and the London Poetry Prize. She’s the author of Mercy, published by Flipped Eye, and a three-time Barbican Young Poet. She’s a co-founder of live literature project Bedtime Stories for the End of the World, and of independent media production company Planet B Productions. She’s on the editorial team at The Ecologist magazine, and she teaches creative writing with organisations including City Lit, the Poetry School and Goldsmiths University of London.