New Moon Poetry and Tea explores how poetic and ritual practices can function as forms of collective knowledge production, where language, objects, and sensory experience come together to create a space for reflection. At its core lies the question of how shared poetry and symbolic gestures can offer alternative ways of thinking about connection, time, and perception.

Under the quiet glow of the New Moon, people gathered for an intimate evening of poems, presence, and shared stillness. With warm tea and readings from Moon Bound, we explored not only how we see the Moon, but how the Moon might see us. Gentle, reflective, and full of wonder, the evening reminded us of poetry’s capacity to connect us to the skies, to one another, and to ourselves. Set outdoors around a campfire beneath the visible moon, the gathering unfolded as a hybrid format between lecture, performance, and philosophical café, centred on the Moon Bound project. Throughout the evening, tea was prepared and shared, creating a ritual moment that brought participants together and fostered a sense of collective presence.

During the session, selected texts from Moon Bound were read aloud and collectively discussed. These readings functioned not merely as literary presentations, but as shared acts of reflection, using poetry as a method for activating relational thinking. The moon served as a conceptual anchor: not only as an astronomical body, but as a symbolic framework for cyclical thinking, distance, and collective imagination. Participants were invited to bring personal objects connected to their experience of the project. By placing these objects together around the fire, a temporary assemblage of individual memories emerged within a shared field of meaning. This gesture can be understood as a material expression of “collective narrativity,” in which personal experience becomes embedded within a broader process of shared reflection.