Work That Happens Elsewhere: in-conversation in Books Ireland magazine

I was pleased to be able to formalise an almost decade-long association with New Jersey / New York writer, poet and multimedia artist Chris Campanioni through a commissioned conversation for Books Ireland magazine. The resulting 6,500 word piece exploring the in-conversation format as collaborative enterprise and literary genre has the title 'Work That Happens Elsewhere,' and it was published on 5 December 2025.

From the introduction:

After almost a decade of correspondence, exchange of work and editorial activities, Chris Campanioni (New Jersey) and Christodoulos Makris (Dublin) met in person in New York City in January 2025, cementing a mutual understanding of their work, in particular how it shares strong kinship and an interest in fiercely contemporary culture and poetics.

In this transatlantic in-conversation piece, composed remotely between 26 September and 05 November 2025, the poets reflect on each other’s work and their shared intermedial, cross-disciplinary operational modes, approaches to poetry rooted in digital, documentary and pop culture dynamics, and an avant-garde sensibility shaped by migration—among much else.

Below are some snippets from 'Work That Happens Elsewhere' - which you can read in its entirety here.

Books Ireland is a magazine, and latterly online space, established in 1976 aiming "to inspire and inform through excellent writing." Thanks to editor Ruth McKee for curating the space for Chris and I to perform this conversation and to document wider connections and poetic/artistic networks while moving forward with our work and critical thinking.

Your work, perhaps most explicitly in the poems recited at Cork’s SoundEye Festival this past July (from the ongoing series “The Ugly Truth”), is similarly interested in a reassessment of “book” and “poem” under the glitchy, approximate design of translation, an aesthetics of hypermediation that is either encoded in the language or insinuated, as if occurring off-screen: “this narrative,” you write, “easier to adapt for the stage for sure/not to say less skillful.”

I’m not at all sure poetry’s role is to put order on the chaos of existence, as is often asserted; I’m decidedly privileging a poetics of disorder as a conscious stance...

I feel that the ‘galáxias’ of our work extends beyond the scope of the individual project or book, out to a broader dimension which we may call a practice or an oeuvre. And I am enamoured with your prolific-ness as a firmly irreverent rebuke to perceptions of a poet’s work as something that ought to be crafted slowly, as if only valid in some final, static form. I’d contend that the poetics we share operates in gleeful opposition to stasis.

Your poetry’s inherent polyphony allows for an experience in which what is produced is not narrative per se so much as its trace, like a cassette tape that has been rerecorded and rerecorded and rerecorded, such that it’s possible to hear the remainders—spirits, ghosts—of various originals as sonic sediment. And in your 2023 book-length poem, It Reeks of Radio, you extend that narratorial practice to the archive as a documentarian fiction, exploiting both the expectations and limitations of documentation and testimony, and public records more generally.

Like in the most exciting and iconoclastic poetry, the tensions between what the linguistic material does and the constraints of its form, shape, space, medium, time, become almost unbearable. There is indeed something erotic in the give and take that happens at the moment of contact, where poet meets language meets medium meets reader and all the way back again, which is I realise what I seek in what I pursue to read or experience.

I love what you say here, about layering, about the hyper-moment of making [that] already contain[s] both the impulse that gave rise to it and the spaces and sensations of encounter. To think of writing as nothing more and nothing less than reading, and reading as translating, reveals “making” as something other than publication, something other than or also then writing. In this scenario, the act of writing becomes almost incidental, supplementary, an escort of the body, anybody, who reads their environment as if it were a text.

I seek ways to creative-critically destabilise—always with a clear sense of the probable futility of the exercise, and in deadly serious jest—the unthinking practice of us providing all this raw material through keystrokes, tapping, swiping, which is sold back to us in many forms, one of the latest being the ubiquity of generative Artificial Intelligence. “They fuck you up, your metadata” you write in Windows 85, and this diachronic collaboration of yours with Larkin (and all the baggage of his meta-data) suddenly becomes multi-dimensional and luminous.

What we are talking about here is the affect of virtual encounters—virtual, not in the sense of digitalization, but the virtual charge of our experience with art in its continuous unfolding, a kink in temporality that links the immensity of “forever” with the immediacy of any “now”...

To think of the essence of poetry and creative activity more broadly as existing in its residue serves neither poet/artist nor community. LLMs and generative AI offer a genuine opportunity to ask questions and consider poetry anew, rethink where it happens and where its value lies.