Poetry's Environments at The University of Leeds

Earlier this month I contributed a performative paper at the international conference 'Poetry's Environments' organised and hosted by Poetry@Leeds at The University of Leeds. The conference took place over three days (9-11 June 2026) at Cloth Court Hall in Leeds city centre and the University of Leeds campus.

Convened by a team headed by Kimberly Campanello, Professor of Poetry and Director of Poetry@Leeds, 'Poetry's Environments' aimed to "consider poetry that addresses the natural environment and the environments in which poetry is written, experienced, performed, preserved, and studied" by bringing together "international poets, critics, translators, archivists, activists, textual editors, digital specialists, literary professionals, and individuals, groups and organisations involved in poetry and its environments".

My contribution was part of a panel called 'Marks & Materials 1' which also included readings and presentations by Nasser Hussein and Olivia McCannon and was chaired by Maia Elsner. It took place in the afternoon of Wednesday 10 June in the Denim Room of Cloth Court Hall.

From the abstract of my contribution, as published in the conference programme:

"Generative AI offers us an opportunity to rethink our poetry conditioning, to shift it from product to process - from an artform wedded to achievement and posterity to one operating in the hyper-present, from multiple positions and in multiple dimensions. [This will be] a performance enacting this exploration in a creative-critical mode through excerpts from a new hybrid book-length work of poetry."

I chose to deliver, without commentary, the majority of the text comprising my new long poem 'A Challenge' - taken from my larger current project nobody is going to be unique - by reading each section from a different position in the room, before detaching each page in turn from my stapled script, defacing it by scribbling over the printed text a large letter of the alphabet [cumulatively spelling W-H-E-R-E-I-S-T-H-E-P-O-E-T-(RY)] with a colour marker, and either tacking these pieces of paper on the room's pristine walls, or scattering them before attendees on the neat arrangement of tables. One of my intentions with this approach was to draw attention to the moment and site of delivery, poetry's constellation of possible materials, and the interactions of bodies in a room as spaces where the contemporary poem may reside. This would also potentially suggest a thought path - given the text and concerns of nobody is going to be unique - to considering how the emergence of generative machine intelligence impacts on and offers a new understanding of the conditions and essence of making poetry at the quarter mark of the 21st century, and making it public.

Nasser Hussein's paper preceded mine, and followed a structure indebted to John Cage's 4:33 in presenting two pieces from his upcoming publication with Coach House Books: a poem impossible to read out conventionally called '[!]', and a visual-sonic poem called 'ooo'. Olivia McCannon followed me with a performance of, and a talk about, poems from her 2025 book The Lives of Z that demonstrated mixed-media experiments reflecting on their materialities and locations.

Happily it turned out to be an engaging session for the attendees, as evidenced by the volume and range of responses and questions on the threads and extrapolations provoked by and between our approaches to the expanded sites, marks and materials of poetry. We didn't have time to get to them all, with Maia Elsner's notes and prepared questions having to be omitted altogether - a demonstration of the interest our readings / presentations / papers / performances collectively aroused.

*

The conference programme overall offered a cornucopia of approaches to the question of the environment(s) where poetry happens or thrives. With up to four sessions taking place simultaneously it was impossible to access more than a quarter of the work on offer. My personal highlights include the Guillemot Press panel with its attention to the possibilities of archival and documentary material infiltrating the landscape of the page (echoing some of the concerns embedded in my project and book It Reeks of Radio); JT Welsch drawing lines between Dante's Divine Comedy and YouTuber Logan Paul's highly controversial visit to Aokigahara, often described as Japan’s ‘suicide forest’, in the context of the poetic space of suicide; Richard A Carter's thesis, through his discussion of a 'poetics of flight' or 'Aeolian poetics', on privileging ephemerality and resisting digital mapping - in stark contrast to Christian Bök's attempts to create and publish poetry outlasting the human universe through his extraordinary ongoing project The Xenotext, presented in the same session; Joey Connolly's paper on the capitalist reframing of identities into 'data subjects' with reference to moments in poems by Jorie Graham that emphasise the physical and technological conditions of writing; and Zoë Skoulding's talk and reading from her recent book Do I Look Like an Atmosphere? considering a poet's relationships with other languages, human or non-human.

A centrepiece of the conference was a public interview with British Poet Laureate and Professor of Poetry at The University of Leeds, Simon Armitage, conducted by Kimberly at Rupert Beckett Lecture Theatre on the evening of Wednesday 10 June.

A pleasure to have the opportunity to contribute to 'Poetry's Environments'. Catching up with old friends and making new ones is always a key component of these gatherings. Thanks to Kimberly and team for organising it with imagination and meticulousness, and for inviting me to participate.

Photos: Kimberly Campanello & Roula-Maria Dib