About

Sarah Dawson is a poet, artist, performer, researcher and educator. This website provides access to her performance videos and publications, her CV, and details of her upcoming events.

She is currently a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds, studying the practice of failure in contemporary experimental poetry performance. She devises performances that use difficulty and risk to generate unexpected outcomes. Examples include Exercise 3, in which she translates a poem into the phonetic alphabet, and her progressive forgetting of a poem from her book expecting a different result.

expecting a different result is her most recent publication, a collection of forty visual poem cards that the reader can rearrange to establish different relationships. The repetitive processes of tracing, copying, folding, sewing and digital manipulation constituted a form of mourning, and the book suggests means through which we can simultaneously remember and forget. It reflects Sarah’s longstanding interest in making process and labour visible in finished works, and in finding ways to combine the experimental and the sentimental.

She is interested in making experimental poetry methodologies accessible to others, enabling anybody to adapt the processes of visual poetry, collaborative poetry and experimental poetry performance for their own purposes. To this end, she has worked with the Henry Moore Institute, co-producing a booklet to guide young people through the process of making a visual poem in response to their 2021-2022 exhibition Slip, and spoke to local teachers at a continuing professional development event. She is also a postgraduate teaching assistant at the University of Leeds.

To contact Sarah Dawson, you can email sarah at sarah-dawson dot co dot uk, or use the below form.