O, Let the Things Themselves!
Desire(d) Line(s) & the Laws of Thermodynamics as Poetic Practice with/in Space(s)
On June 11, 2026 I travelled to Leeds to deliver a talk (a paper) on my poetic practice as part of 'Poetry's Environments' Conference. I remember the call for abstracts going out, sometime near the end of 2025, & I was delighted when when my abstract was accepted for the conference. It is the first time I have presented my poetic work in an academic setting, and I continue to think a lot about the sessions I attended, and some of the conversations I had with other writers - all of whom are doing really exceptional things (underpinned by wild and intellectually rigorous thinking around poetic forms, and how the knowledge generated from poetic approaches to understanding space (both natural and urban) can meaningfully engage all the other kinds and forms of knowledge required to address some of the gravest ecological and climate-related challenges of our time. About the conference itself, the organizers detail(ed) the following:
"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)?"
With this as an exquisite jumping off point, I set myself to writing a paper that considered my poetic practice across two projects, the first being the body of work I produced (10 poems) as part (S)worn State(s), a collaboration with poets Annemarie Ni Churreain and Kimberly Campanello, and the second being a current (on-going and long-term) project 'a ghost, an animal or a dead body - ' (which began as a commission for 'Strangelets' - a series of digital pamphlets published by Abridged).
The paper is structured in four parts, each considered through the O of language, & eye / I, & mouth (which inevitably makes the shape of 'O' every time it opens). Some of the highlights are included below (as is the full pdf version of the paper).
The conference was expertly curated and programmed by the organizing committee, and I am glad I was able to be a part of it, and to contribute to it. From what I understand, there will be another, in time.
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
Conference Partnerships
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.
"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)?"
With this as an exquisite jumping off point, I set myself to writing a paper that considered my poetic practice across two projects, the first being the body of work I produced (10 poems) as part (S)worn State(s), a collaboration with poets Annemarie Ni Churreain and Kimberly Campanello, and the second being a current (on-going and long-term) project 'a ghost, an animal or a dead body - ' (which began as a commission for 'Strangelets' - a series of digital pamphlets published by Abridged).
The paper is structured in four parts, each considered through the O of language, & eye / I, & mouth (which inevitably makes the shape of 'O' every time it opens). Some of the highlights are included below (as is the full pdf version of the paper).
The conference was expertly curated and programmed by the organizing committee, and I am glad I was able to be a part of it, and to contribute to it. From what I understand, there will be another, in time.
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
Conference Partnerships
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.
Part 1: O, to begin / to be in anywhere…
“[v]isible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it sees and moves itself, it holds things in a circle around itself” - Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
In this state, I go back to the beginning – as a way to re-member myself, in body, then – and what I imagined was the point, when I began writing the poems that would form my part of (S)worn State(s), a poetic collaboration between myself, and poets Annemarie Ni Churreain and Kimberly Campanello. The project, which culminated in a letterpress publication by The Salvage Press in 2024, contains work that is characterised by visual, multi-lingual and embodied approaches to language, evoking a wide range of ‘states’ of female embodiment and thought, including pleasure, joy, and experiences of intellectual interrogation. What an earful – for you…and a mouthful, for me. And yet - when it comes to my state of mind, both then & now, it is important to understand that my ambition – what I desired to do, using my eyes & hands, my throat & mouth – was anything but small.
“[v]isible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it sees and moves itself, it holds things in a circle around itself” - Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
In this state, I go back to the beginning – as a way to re-member myself, in body, then – and what I imagined was the point, when I began writing the poems that would form my part of (S)worn State(s), a poetic collaboration between myself, and poets Annemarie Ni Churreain and Kimberly Campanello. The project, which culminated in a letterpress publication by The Salvage Press in 2024, contains work that is characterised by visual, multi-lingual and embodied approaches to language, evoking a wide range of ‘states’ of female embodiment and thought, including pleasure, joy, and experiences of intellectual interrogation. What an earful – for you…and a mouthful, for me. And yet - when it comes to my state of mind, both then & now, it is important to understand that my ambition – what I desired to do, using my eyes & hands, my throat & mouth – was anything but small.
Part 2: O, let the things themselves…
How things correspond is of deep concern; correspondence between one thing & another pre-occupies me to such degree that I have spent the better part of my time, in practice, making sum (of things). Some part of this summing owes itself to fragments of correspondence between Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca from some time, long before now. In a letter to Lorca, Dalí writes, ‘I am convinced that in poetry our efforts only make sense when they lead us to evade the ideas our intelligence has forged artificially, and gives things their exact, real sense.’ In another, he goes on, writing to Lorca of breasts, of all things: ‘an edible white, the metallic white of a stray breast (you know that there are also ‘stray breasts,’ just the opposite of flying breasts, for the stray one is at peace without knowing what to do and is so defenceless it moves me).’ Until, finally, in yet another letter, he gets down to the point (of the matter): ‘Let the things themselves decide where their shadows fall!’.
How things correspond is of deep concern; correspondence between one thing & another pre-occupies me to such degree that I have spent the better part of my time, in practice, making sum (of things). Some part of this summing owes itself to fragments of correspondence between Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca from some time, long before now. In a letter to Lorca, Dalí writes, ‘I am convinced that in poetry our efforts only make sense when they lead us to evade the ideas our intelligence has forged artificially, and gives things their exact, real sense.’ In another, he goes on, writing to Lorca of breasts, of all things: ‘an edible white, the metallic white of a stray breast (you know that there are also ‘stray breasts,’ just the opposite of flying breasts, for the stray one is at peace without knowing what to do and is so defenceless it moves me).’ Until, finally, in yet another letter, he gets down to the point (of the matter): ‘Let the things themselves decide where their shadows fall!’.
Part 3: O, have you seen my ghost (seen my ghost, seen my ghost…)
The result, in sum, is here. Here are photographs/images as representation(s) of reflection & distortion (meaning – a change in the form of an electrical signal or sound wave during processing; also meaning – a distorted form or part; also meaning – the action of giving a misleading account or impression ) & transformation – of temporal and spatial planes; with /in the digital / analogue divide; until the line between the two dissolves (a spontaneous process (!)) towards absolute zero(!).
The result, in sum, is here. Here are photographs/images as representation(s) of reflection & distortion (meaning – a change in the form of an electrical signal or sound wave during processing; also meaning – a distorted form or part; also meaning – the action of giving a misleading account or impression ) & transformation – of temporal and spatial planes; with /in the digital / analogue divide; until the line between the two dissolves (a spontaneous process (!)) towards absolute zero(!).
Part 4: O, I want you eye want you I want you…
These reversals, these antinomies, are different ways of saying that vision is caught or is made in the middle of things, where something visible undertakes to see, becomes visible for itself and through the vision of all things, where the indivision of the sensing and the sensed persists, like the original fluid within…. – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The eye goes looking for ways to touch what it cannot see. Continuing the desired line of inquiry that unfurled from (S)worn State(s), in this work, in progress, I have made poems that stand as (mathematical) proofs. The poetic proofs in ‘a ghost, an animal, or a dead body’ all centre from ‘the eye’ – and here, I draw on the work of Luce Irigaray, and her thinking around the ‘look as tactile’ and ‘the look as caress’. The relationship to the poetic gaze touches me, beyond; in correspondence with the female gaze, I break the fourth wall. After everything – every big & little thing among things that has come before or ever will, I turn to Emerson: [t]he eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; & throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end -
These reversals, these antinomies, are different ways of saying that vision is caught or is made in the middle of things, where something visible undertakes to see, becomes visible for itself and through the vision of all things, where the indivision of the sensing and the sensed persists, like the original fluid within…. – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The eye goes looking for ways to touch what it cannot see. Continuing the desired line of inquiry that unfurled from (S)worn State(s), in this work, in progress, I have made poems that stand as (mathematical) proofs. The poetic proofs in ‘a ghost, an animal, or a dead body’ all centre from ‘the eye’ – and here, I draw on the work of Luce Irigaray, and her thinking around the ‘look as tactile’ and ‘the look as caress’. The relationship to the poetic gaze touches me, beyond; in correspondence with the female gaze, I break the fourth wall. After everything – every big & little thing among things that has come before or ever will, I turn to Emerson: [t]he eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; & throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end -
