The Critical Poetics and Ecology network is principally a space for poets, practitioners or writers who see themselves as working poetically in their research on ecologies. We aim to provide a supportive training environment for PGRs, ECRs and established researchers, to develop insight into urgent strands in the theory and practice of critical poetics and ecology. The training event series of 2025/2026 will carry attendees through the full writing process, from theory, to ideas development, to experimentation, to live reading, to journal submissions and publication. To this end, we offer a structured sequence of network events in the form of symposia, experimental poetry/language labs, live readings, and a publishing industry session.

We engage contemporary poetics via urgent questions in the critical ecologies, facilitating and supporting practical and theoretical spaces of encounter with the (natural) world. The ethos for the network is inspired by theories of critical fabulation (Saidiya Hartman, Donna Haraway) as well as by critical theorists who firmly locate a question of ecology within a question of language (Mel Y. Chen, Aimé Cesaire, Sylvia Wynter). What are the emancipatory and creative possibilities of poetic critique, poetic listening, and poetic fabulation in addressing critical ecological themes? In approaching the ecological from this position, we will collectively explore and enact poetry as a relational practice (Édouard Glissant), or as a praxis of repair, presence, liminality, errantry, emanation, and futurity. With our emphasis on the critical and ecological, we centre these questions in inherently emancipatory, minoritised, queer and decolonial perspectives and practices. We define ecology in the widest sense, with a particular attention to overlapping legacies of extractive capitalism, racist colonialism and militarised industrial development.

The group is co-led by Dr Penn Newell, Lecturer in Creative and Critical Writing in the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication at Birkbeck and Olivia Allison, PhD Candidate in English and Humanities at Birkbeck.