Kedrick James is a Senior Instructor and Director of the Digital Literacy Centre in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. His research interests span ecological and digital poetics.

Carl Leggo is a poet and professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. He has published seventeen books of poetry and scholarship, always with a focus on creativity, the arts, and education.

Poetry from the Matrix of Mother Nature and Mother Board

As two scholars committed to Poetic Inquiry, we find ourselves positioned between diametrical impulses guiding our creative practices: between an organic poetics of speaking truthfully from the heart and living poetically on the one hand, and a digital poetics of crafting utterance from logical constraints and living probabilistically on the other. These two approaches seem to draw inspiration from different environments, responding to the place-based physical environment versus responding to the space-based virtual environment. We argue that poetry is an ideal vehicle of inquiry into both real and artificial worlds, and although the methods of inquiry may be distinct, the outcomes, as poetry, could lead toward a more unified understanding and awareness of points of intersection between worlds. The hybridisation of compositional strategies reflects our relationship to language more broadly during a time of increasing dis/placement and automation of all literacy practices, including the writing of poetry.