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About the Conference
Poetry shapes and transforms experiences and attitudes toward nature and ecology, just as the natural environment maps the poetic imagination. Poetry roots itself in the environment of the breath, the voice, the hand, and the ear. It roams over pages of books and across digital, computational, performative, archival, monumental, and ephemeral landscapes. Poetry emerges and resides in institutional and ad hoc ecosystems, and it sounds and senses within and without the body of the poet, the audience, the blade of grass.
Poetry’s Environments will bring together international poets, critics, translators, archivists, activists, textual editors, digital specialists, literary professionals, and individuals, groups and organisations involved in poetry and its environments. The conference aims to consider poetry that addresses the natural environment and the environments in which poetry is written, experienced, performed, preserved, and studied.
If poetry ‘makes us feel things’, how does it move beyond acting as mood music for crisis and collapse and offer the ‘means to live through [its] making’ (Viktor Shklovsky)?
The conference will be held at Cloth Hall Court, the University's state-of-the-art conference centre in the heart of the city. Conference events will be held on the University of Leeds campus.
Poetry@Leeds are partnering with the National Poetry Centre, the Poetry Book Society, Leeds Literature Festival (running from June 5 - 15), Modern Poetry in Translation, Banshee Press, Guillemot Press, Hazel Press, and Galleries and Cultural Collections at the University of Leeds.
The conference is now at capacity. Evening events associated with the conference are open to the public and can be booked online.
Conference Team
Kimberly Campanello, Fiona Becket, Emma Cayley, Fiona Douglas, Maia Elsner, Luis Harrison, David Higgins, Matt Howard, Hazel Hutchison, Zaffar Kunial, Sarah Prescott, Rowland Thomas, Caitlin Stobie, Matthew Treherne, Emma Trott, Luisa Valozic Nenadic
Book tickets to public events