Decomposing Poems

As part of her 2023/4 residency at Wytham Woods, Penny Boxall has written a cycle of poems about soil. Underfoot – literally downtrodden – it nonetheless nourishes and grounds us, and carries connotations of home, remembrance and forgetfulness. This October Penny is printing a selection of these new poems for display in Wytham Woods, where they will be exposed to the elements and wildlife in a process of decomposition. We invite you to walk with us to visit the poems in situ, and then join for a conversation between Penny and Charlie Lee-Potter, the 2024/5 writer-in-residence at the Woods.

Penny Boxall is a poet and children’s writer. She won the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award (Scotland’s largest poetry prize) with her debut collection, Ship of the Line. Her fourth poetry book, The Curiosities, about the materiality of memory, was published in June 2024. She was Visiting Research Fellow in the Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford in 2019, and has undertaken residencies and commissions internationally, including in Norway, Denmark, the US, Poland, Switzerland and Estonia. She has held Royal Literary Fund Fellowships at the Universities of Cambridge and York, and is now an RLF Bridge Fellow in schools across Oxfordshire and the Midlands. Her debut novel for children, Letty and the Mystery of the Golden Thread, is out soon from Puffin.

Dr Charlie Lee-Potter is a writer, lecturer, artist and journalist. As the former presenter of BBC Radio 4 programmes such as PM, The World at One, Open Book and The World This Weekend, Charlie has a particular interest in the combination of found sound and the written word. She is an artist, filmmaker and sound artist herself, and her new podcast Inside A Mountain uses complex soundscape and music to evoke the atmosphere of walks with guests such as international cellist Natalie Clein, poet Ian McMillan, and mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. In 2022 the podcast was shortlisted for the International Women’s Podcast Awards. Charlie has also been awarded the International Créateurs Design Prize for Creative Journalism for her work on the sculptor Auguste Rodin.

Host or Publisher Wytham Woods