Deadline: November 30, 2026
Contact: Pawel Piszczatowski, Professor, University of Warsaw
Email: p.piszczatowski@uw.edu.pl

How does poetry write Earth, and how might such writing unsettle territory? This panel/seminar brings geopoetics into conversation with ecopoetry and the materiality of writing to explore how language, bodies, and earthly processes participate in the making—and unmaking—of place.

Paul Celan’s poetics offers one point of departure. His notes toward The Meridian associate poetic language with lapidary inscription and the displaced, resistant presence of an “erratic language-block.” Read through this lens, stone, soil, ash, and fossilized traces bear upon poetic form, shaping its fractures, silences, and modes of address. The encounter with stone also raises the question of how poetry approaches an other whose time and material existence exceed human understanding.

Such encounters require attention to historical specificity. How can poetry bring geological duration into contact with memories of persecution, displacement, and extermination without absorbing historical violence into seemingly timeless natural processes? How might earthly connectedness remain accountable to unequal claims to land and irreparable loss?

We invite scholarly and creative-critical contributions addressing:

Earth and territory: How do poems engage borders, property, extraction, and exile? Can belonging be articulated without possession?

Materiality and form: How do sedimentation, erosion, petrification, and fracture inform poetic syntax, rhythm, media, and inscription?

Address and opacity: How does poetry approach more-than-human others while attending to their alterity, silence, or resistance to interpretation?

Deep time and historical memory: How do geological and multispecies temporalities intersect with singular histories of violence?

Situated practices and ethical limits: How do walking, listening, and embodied attention enable witness, care, or resistance? Where do repair and reconciliation reach their limits?

Contributions across languages and poetic traditions are welcome; engagement with Celan is optional.

Please send a 250–300-word abstract and brief biographical note to p.piszczatowski@uw.edu.pl by November 30, 2026.

Posted on October 15, 2026