Walking with The Waste Land developing a walking collaboration with The Garden Gate in Margate.

A walk in May

Walking with The Waste Land and the Garden Gate  Margate.

“ a poem can be like walking down a street  and noticing things, extending itself without obscurity or too much effort” Larry Eigner  (for Charlotte)

We met at 12pm and walked from the Garden Gate to The Ridings through Northcot House Gardens.

 It wasn’t our intended destination when we started but it was a beautiful sunny day and when we got to Cliftonville Library we saw the sea in the distance and the group decided it was where we should go. 

Some of what we saw we saw:

Building bird houses (at the Garden Gate)

Flowers: Tulips, Pansies, Aquilegia, Wallflowers, Hyacinths, Sweet Williams Geraniums, Poppies

A cobweb hanging from a tree.                                       

The Pump station at The Ridings 

Hog’s Fennel (closely related to cow parsley) 

We also saw:

A cloud shaped like an Oyster Shell and another one like a dinosaur.

We talked about The Pump house ( with thanks to Laura)  walking, breathing, connecting to the ground, meditation, and how maybe on our next walk we could write some poetry and make some ropes.

Our next walk is on, June 8th, 10 am - 12 pm , meet at the Garden Gate. It would be lovely if you could join us!

Photography, courtesy of Jennifer Deakin.

Walking with ‘The Waste Land’ is a community group founded by artist Elspeth Penfold in 2014. The group use walking as a research tool for locating TS Eliot’s The Waste Land and selected other poems in Margate. The group works closely with Turner Contemporary’s Waste Land Research Group who are developing Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’, Turner Contemporary’s first major exhibition of 2018, which will be on show from 3^rd February – 20^th May 2018, focused on connections between Eliot’s poem and the visual arts.