You are invited to join Bristol-based poet, writer and located audio designer Ralph Hoyte to co-create the Quantock Poetry Trail. I am looking for poets and people interested in writing poetry and lyrical prose who have an active connection with the Quantocks*

WHAT DOES IT INVOLVE? The project is an invitation to develop your writing (specifically poetry and/or lyrical prose) through co-creating the Quantock Poetry Trail with me and fellow writers. The writings will have been inspired by particular locations in and around the Quantocks; or, they will relate to these locations … that is to say, they don’t have to be ‘about’ a particular location (a poem about loss, for example, may relate to and be located at a lonely fir tree high atop the hills…). Or it may be an existing work. I’m open to engaging with people on their own terms!

The co-creators of the trail communicate regularly in a variety of ways: online, on Zoom etc, and physically, walking together on a series of walks.

The walking/talking/composing/discussing process continues till about the end of May 2023, after which there will be a series of recording sessions followed by a putting together process

*poets and people writing poetry and lyrical prose who live in the Quantocks and adjoining areas; poets and people writing poetry from further afield who have a strong Quantocks and/or Romantic poet connection

What happens to our work?

• Our work will be published online in writing and as audio recordings; selected poems will be published ‘in paper form’ (possibly Georgian-era style ‘broadsheet poems’); more publishing possibilities will emerge as the project progresses; performances will be part of the mix
• Selected work – and this is the really exciting bit – will form part of a digitally geo-located Quantock Poetry Trail across the Quantock Hills (and outliers). Anyone with a smartphone – poets, visitors, ramblers, geo-cachers – will be able to physically follow in the footsteps of the Romantic poets to find and listen to our selected poems IN THE ACTUAL LOCATIONS which inspired them or to which they relate!
• Through the same magical technologies, listeners will be joined on the Quantock Poetry Trail by the actual Romantic poets. Anyone with a smartphone will be able to eavesdrop on them as young people – they were only in their 20s – as they compose, squabble, get drunk, philosophize – and discuss their revolutionary new concept for poetry: ‘Romantic poetry: the poetry of the sublime, in the language of the common person’!