What is a poetics of scale? This talk draws on Mina Gorji’s practice as a poet and literary critic to explore the affordances of lyric to move between multiple scales of perception, experience, and time. Between sound and history, insect and constellation, crystal and volcano, the temporality of a verse line and deep time, how can poetry disrupt and expand the ways in which we understand belonging? At what scale of time, for example, is a person, a wasp, a word or plant — native/ atopic/ extant/ extinct? To examine such questions, Mina Gorji will read from a variety of poems to think about how the experience of lyric listening activates different registers of scale.

Mina Gorji is Associate Professor in English at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Pembroke College.   She has published widely on lyric poetry of the Romantic period, and is co-director of the Centre for John Clare Studies. She is currently completing a book on Listening in and to Romantic Lyric poetry, funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. She has two collections of poetry with Carcanet: Art of Escape (2020), which recently, in translation, won the International Award for Womens’ Writing in Italy (Premio di Scrittura femminile) and Scale (2022) a White Review Book of the Year, and was described in Poetry Review as ‘a gorgeous book of miniatures’ and in the Irish Times as ‘a book of deep sonic attention’.

Based on Zeynep Bulut’s book, Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin (Goldsmiths Press, 2025), this presentation and discussion will explore how voice can be imagined as skin and what such a conception offers in times of crisis and uncertainties.

Drawing on the notions and practices of embodied voice in experimental music and participatory media art, the event will revisit individual, collective, and multi-sensory processes of voice-making in everyday life. In so doing, it will consider the conception of a voice, one that is both individual and anonymous, and one that functions like a skin, a multi-sensory interface and surface that both connects and differentiates bodies of all kinds without being limited to discursive labels of language.

Through the notion of voice-as-skin, this book presentation and discussion will reflect on the ethical implications and significance of voice-making processes for global issues like environmental crisis and artificial intelligence, while also questioning rushed forms of communication and presumed understandings of empathy.

Zeynep Bulut is a voice and sound theorist. She is a lecturer in Music at SARC, Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Sound and Music, at Queen’s University Belfast. Her work theorises the emergence, embodiment and mediation of voice as skin. She is the author of Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin (Goldsmiths Press, 2025). Her articles have appeared in various volumes and journals including The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art, Perspectives of New Music, Postmodern Culture, and Music and Politics. She is project lead for the research platform Music, Arts, Health, and Environment, supported by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Impact Acceleration Account at QUB. Alongside her scholarly work, she has also exhibited sound works, composed and performed vocal pieces for concert, video, and theater, and released two singles. Her composer profile has been featured by British Music Collection. She is a certified practitioner of Deep Listening.

Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist, and artistic director of The Listening Biennial. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including: Communities in Movement (2019-23), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), Oficina de Autonomia (2017–), The Imaginary Republic (2014–19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-22), Surface Tension (2003-08), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995, he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: Poetics of Listening (2025), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015).