Myceliopoetics

MycelioPoetics brings together the mycelic (the underground connective body at the center of fungal break-down) with poetics (language at its most attentive) in order to ask how poetic attention simultaneously breaks and connects. How can poetics be thought to decay, forget, wear down in order to cohere, forge, grow, and vise versa? Rather than a fully articulated theoretical stance, MycelioPoetics is meant to evoke contrasting images of degradation and organic growth as a beginning point for speculation and creation. The resulting series will carve out a constellation defining “myceliopoetics,” further complicated with each entry.

MycelioPoetics invites writers to meditate on the relationships between decay and growth, remembering and forgetting, loss and community in relation not only to poetry, but to all sites of “language” writ large: eye contact with a stranger at a coffee shop, spy novels, dance, the many cries for help going ignored. How can we talk about what we gain by losing and lose by gaining?

The first chapbook in the series, by Lena Walker, is forthcoming April 2026.

The series is supported by the University at Buffalo Poetics Program.