Teaching on an undergraduate poetry module here at the University of Leeds recently with my colleagues and fellow poets Matt Howard and Zaffar Kunial we decided to include a lecture and a workshop on the topic of either ‘Thinking in Poems’ or ‘Thinking with Poems’. We wanted something which pertained to both prepositions. To my mind, this would act as something of a helpful counter to today’s dominant assumption that poetry is above all else a form of self-expression, an assumption that is always likely to diminish poetry’s creativity and undervalue its artifice.

Matt Howard’s chosen texts for his workshop included poems by John Keats, John Clare, Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes, Kathleen Jamie, and James Wright, as well as his own ‘Sedge Warbler’ and ‘Nest Surveying 1’ – both poems which combine acute observations of natural history with an equally acute awareness of human cognition and the difference of other species. Zaffar’s lecture spliced thinking in poetry with the pastoral. In ‘A green thought in a green shade’ he focused – of course – on Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden’, but also Edward Thomas’s ‘Old Man’, W. H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, Seamus Heaney’s ‘Banks of a Canal’, as well as ‘Foxglove Country’ and ‘The Hedge’ from his most recent collection, England’s Green. Zaffar concentrated his attention – in line with his own characteristic aesthetic – on ‘the thinking that might happen in a green space’, and on the poem as a ‘space which holds different kinds of time together’.

In our deliberations we were ...