Cat Woodward is a feminist modern lyric poet and a graduate of The University of East Anglia. Her PhD is in robot and lyric voice and her doctoral research was funded through a CHASE studentship. Cat’s first collection, Sphinx, was published by Salò, press in 2017. Her second collection Blood. Flower. Joy! is due from Knives, Forks and Spoons in late 2019. In 2018 she won the Ivan Juritz Prize for creative experiment. Her current project, Imitations, is funded by an Author’s Foundation grant awarded by the Society of Authors. Cat is also a Creative Writing teacher. This year, Cat will read at a number of literary events around England, including at the Lancaster Words Festival (with Lancaster University), UEA Live (with The University of East Anglia) and the Nottingham Poetry Exchange (with The University of Nottingham).

During her Cove Park residency Cat will be working on the creative aspect of her current project, ‘Imitations’. This creative-critical project explores stylistic imitation as poetic collaboration by imitating the voices of other poets, not to produce replicas but in order to enter into productive colloquy, a sort of elision of voices. To imitate in this way is to implicate another embodied writing subject as collaborator by capitalising upon the materialising effect of a lyric subject’s voicing. This method will invite the amalgamating effect of collaboration’s micropolitics upon herself as a participant. To imitate rather than to directly collaborate is to usefully blur the boundaries of ‘single-’ and ‘co-’ authorship by foregrounding the force of that materialising effect. The creative element of ‘imitations’ has a compartmental structure and will eventually comprise of a number of sequences, each around 10 poems, which each imitate the voice of a single poet. So far, she has written sequences which ‘work with’ the voices of Denise Riley and Adam Warne. Cat’s latest experiment ‘works with’ the voice of CA Conrad, and it’s this imitation which she will be developing during her time at Cove Park.

www.catwoodward.com. @cwoodwardpoetry.