The Miseducation of a Nature Poet: Reclaiming Nature Poetry from the Margins by Cara Thompson

Our Writer in Residence Cara Thompson reflects on her position as a 'nature poet' in her journey to becoming Nottingham's inaugural Nature Poet Laureate. Pushing back against the bucolic, idealised, and privileged forms of nature writing she encountered in her schooling in the UK, she reclaims and redefines the genre on more inclusive terms. 

‘After winter, must come spring; Change, it comes eventually.’ 

– Lauryn Hill, 'Everything Is Everything', The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998). 

The memorable ‘Intro’ to Lauryn Hill’s critically acclaimed debut album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, opens with a teacher taking roll call in a noisy classroom before repeatedly calling Hill’s name to no response. When asked about the album’s title in a sit-down interview with the Academy of Achievement in 2000, Hill defined the word ‘miseducation’ as her rejection of ‘what the world says’ a traditional education should look like. She instead valued the learning she gained ‘from life and experience’ over academic systems. 

This anecdote may feel like an odd way to start an article about nature poetry — but stay with me.  

Growing up, Miseducation became one of the soundtracks of my adolescence, and it continues to be an album I return to and feel deep affinity with into my late twenties. It is this word, ‘affinity’, that is key here. While it’s not unusual to hear much about the importance of representation in contemporary discussions on global majority artists and their work, to me, affinity goes deeper than finding an artist that simply looks or sounds like you. The root of the word actually comes from the Latin words ‘ad’ and ‘finis’, meaning ‘to border’, which I believe accurately captures the word’s essence. When we feel an affinity to a creative work, that work has transcended the experience of its creator and spoken to our inner world. Fifteen-year-old me didn’t just resonate with Hill as another young Black woman making art (and to say so would reduce us both to a monolith). ​Her unflinching lyricism, rich cultural references, and courage to forge her own creative and educational path made me want to be brave as an emerging writer and a young woman discovering her own voice. ​​While it can be undeniably empowering to feel culturally seen by an artist, it is a rare but unforgettable occasion to find art that is able to look back at you and say ‘I see you too’.   

But what does all of this have to do with nature poetry? 

In August 2025, I was selected to become Nottingham’s first Nature Poet Laureate. This unique ecological spin on the traditional Poet Laureate role was created by Nottingham City of Literature to find a local poet to lead an eighteen-month programme. This programme would be focused on fostering deeper connections between Nottingham’s communities and the natural world, while highlighting the climate crisis through the written word. While one might presume that anyone applying for this role would already be an experienced, self-identifying nature poet, my journey to this position wasn’t quite so straightforward. 

In my Substack article following the announcement, I wrote about how many people’s first exposure to nature poetry occurs within an English classroom. My own journey began there. The very first nature poem I can recall reading was ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ by William Wordsworth, the United Kingdom’s eleventh Poet Laureate. I was around nine years old at the time, and my school was taking part in a national campaign where children were tasked with learning Wordsworth’s poem from memory for a chance to compete against other schoolchildren in a national Wordsworth recital slam. Funnily enough, I actually made it to the final three within my class and had to recite the piece in front of my entire school; but I got pipped to the post in the end by a much more captivating competitor.  

When I look back at this experience, I can’t help but wonder if this introduction to nature poetry was more of an excommunication than an education. ​While I can still rattle off Wordsworth’s famous opening lines like a phone number (‘I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o'er vales and hills’), I can’t say that I ever felt invited to uncover any sense of affinity or appreciation for the natural world within his words. I also can’t recall my nine-year-old self ever feeling encouraged to find any connection to the language or sentiments of a Regency-era man wandering​​ the Lake District. As a city kid, my personal experience of nature typically didn’t extend much further than my local park. ​​While I could logically understand that Wordsworth was sharing his adoration of the British countryside, ​nothing about my first exposure to nature poetry spoke to or for a child like me. 

It is a rare but unforgettable occasion to find art that is able to look back at you and say ‘I see you too’

To be clear, my issue here is not with Wordsworth’s poetry, nor do I think every piece of literature needs to reflect our personal experiences to be impactful. My issue is with how his poetry was taught to me and other children alike. If anything, knowing what I know now about Wordsworth as a proponent of the Romantic movement – a once rebellious literary counterculture that valued lived experience over intellectualism – I imagine he would be appalled by the idea of his works being drilled into the minds of inner-city schoolchildren. Looking at it retrospectively, it feels as if there wasn’t any consideration given to how a child like me might be engaged, stirred, or inspired by Wordsworth’s poetry. We were simply studying Wordsworth because we should. He was a symbol of English poetic prestige, and somebody decided that this prestige was the standard that a generation of children should attempt to mimic. Before I knew it, the lines of nature poetry (and in fact, poetry in general) had been subconsciously drawn for me:  

‘This is what important poetry sounds like, and it sounds nothing like you.’ 

As I went on to study English Literature at university, the education I was provided about nature poetry followed a very similar style and method to my introduction to Wordsworth: pastoral, idealised, repetitive, and largely inaccessible to someone with my ‘urban’, Caribbean-British perspective. I hadn’t realised how much this (mis)education had stuck with me until I began writing poetry myself. ​I can even admit that I held a certain prejudice against nature poetry. It read as a genre preoccupied with capturing romantic, inoffensive sentiments, and this sentiment seemed symptomatic of a seemingly oblivious sense of privilege. The British countryside was a space to be enjoyed and enthused about by those with the time, resources, and privilege to access it (in all fairness, considering that around 50% of England’s land is still owned by 1% of the population, perhaps my early perspectives can’t be called entirely unfounded). It seemed to me that writing a nature poem required proximity to an upper-middle-class, typically white, cultural experience of the natural world that I had never felt a part of. Nature poetry was for those who could afford to have their heads in the clouds, not poets like me.

​​So how on earth did I end up as a Nature Poet Laureate?​​​ 

Throughout my tenure, I haven’t been shy about sharing my internal battles when applying for the Nature Poet Laureate position, after the opportunity was first announced. While I’ve been a working writer and facilitator for almost a decade, and so many elements of the role’s description spoke deeply to my own priorities as a poet with a strong foundation in community work and social justice, I couldn’t help but feel the word ‘nature’ was glaring back at me judgmentally. Suddenly, I was that little girl in the classroom again, being asked to perform a relationship with nature that I’d never had the privilege of experiencing. But in the weeks of debating whether I was the right kind of poet to apply for the role, I was forced to ask myself some challenging but deeply important questions.  

Nothing about my first exposure to nature poetry spoke to or for a child like me

First, I began to interrogate what nature poetry actually is. Did a nature poem have to be written in idyllic roaming hills to be valuable, or could a nature poem born in the public parks I grew up in be just as significant? As I flicked through my own work with these questions in mind, I started noticing just how much nature had subtly infiltrated my writing: in the river legends of my elders, in the waterways that weave through my hometown, in the lush tropics my ancestors called home. ​Nature had always been a breathing character in my work; I just hadn’t realised she was there.  

Next, I questioned what makes someone a nature poet, and perhaps more importantly, who decides this. As far as I was aware, it was not a title bestowed by a secret poetry society or an exam I needed to pass. No, ​​to be a nature poet was a choice, a recognition of your belonging within the natural world, and the conviction to acknowledge that belonging in words. 

As I continued to mull the opportunity over, I was surprised by how increasingly expansive my questions became, and how excited I was by their potential answers. Here are a few examples, which I invite you to chew over too:
 

• How often do I encounter nature without even noticing? 

• How could my relationship with nature change by simply paying attention? 

• How might writing nature poetry broaden my understanding of the world? 

• How might writing nature poetry broaden my understanding of myself? 

• How much could we learn about the world if more nature poetry was written from the margins? 

• How much could we lose if we continue to marginalise others, and ourselves, from the natural world? 

• How might nature poetry disturb the very idea of 'margins'? 

• What if nature poetry has enough space for us all?

I began to realise that I might not have to emulate the Old Romantics to call myself a nature poet. Instead, this role could be an opportunity to reimagine the boundaries of nature poetry for myself and for anyone who has felt disconnected from how it is taught, who it centres, and why it is written. It was with these sparks of possibility that I decided to apply for the role, and they have continued to inspire me now as Nottingham’s Nature Poet Laureate and Wasafiri’s Writer in Residence.

My journey has been as much of an unlearning process as it has been a learning one. Reading collections such as Thinking With Trees (2021) by Jason Allen Paisant and Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority (2025), edited by Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf, early on in my tenure showed me that the work of reimagining nature poetry’s boundaries has already begun, and the limited perspective I had been offered during my education was already expanding. ​​​​Additionally, the uneven impacts of the climate crisis have made the need to expand nature writing’s scope impossible to ignore. ​​In my few months as Laureate alone, multiple natural disasters have dismantled the lives and ecosystems of countless communities in the Global South with increasing severity — including the island of my family, Jamaica, which was hit by a Category 5 hurricane in October 2025. Hearing first-hand accounts of the impact of the disaster from my relatives brought into sharp focus why the perspectives of those most affected (yet so often excluded) from mainstream nature writing are vital – not optional – in how we capture and understand the natural world.

Nature had always been a breathing character in my work; I just hadn’t realised she was there

​​​​​While these examples show why nature poetry must broaden its voices and horizons, it is just as important to consider how nature poetry is taught, shared, and practised in a more inclusive way. 

This line of thinking deeply influenced my approach to facilitating my three-part online workshop series with Wasafiri, titled Slow Poetry: Writing Through Hibernation. Inspired by the slowness of the natural world during the deep winter months, the workshops were designed to explore what nature can teach us about slowing down in our own creative and personal practices. Over three months, participants from around the globe came together with me over Zoom. Rather than focusing on the pressures of rushing, productivity, and self-judgment that so often weigh on us as writers, I invited participants to respond gently and freely to examples of slowness in nature, and to build their own unique poetic relationships with the world around them. Even when responding to the same natural imagery or prompt, I was constantly moved by the richness and variety of creative responses that emerged during these sessions. Looking back, facilitating the workshops was a real full-circle moment for me in my own nature poetry journey, demonstrating firsthand just how exciting and possible it is to open up the doors to nature writing. Every session was a reminder that a relationship with the natural world can be cultivated anywhere — and that every voice and experience has a place within it. 

The more time I spend in this role, the more I realise that my initial reservations about the ‘nature’ of the position were exactly why I needed to apply. The very act of writing nature poetry from the margins exposes just how unnatural and absurd those margins are in the first place. We do not need to be nature experts or have a prescribed amount of access to nature to be nature poets: all we need is to recognise ourselves as part of the natural world. Nature poetry reminds us that we are all beings within a larger ecosystem, and that we are connected to, through, and by that ecosystem. I am not sure if there is any greater form of affinity than this. 

With these reflections in mind, I find myself returning to the works of an old nature poetry nemesis of mine, who had his own bold ideas about education:

‘Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?
… And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher: 
Come forth into the light of things, 
Let Nature be your teacher.’ 

— William Wordsworth, ‘The Tables Turned’, Lyrical Ballads (1798) 

While Wordsworth's poetry once resembled a distant ideal to me, I am now able to experience his words as an invitation. The world around us, in all its versions and voices, can be our classroom, where there is space for us all. I hope that this reflection demonstrates just how much potential nature poetry has to transform how we relate to the world and to each other. 

Cover image: Drawing, Rain Forest, Jamaica, West Indies, April–August 1865 by Frederic Edwin Church