JR Carpenter – Laurel Prize: Below the Surface

Welcome to our Laurel Prize: Below the Surface for the 2025 Laurel Prize finalists. These pieces shine a light on the creative practice behind these outstanding collections. We were also intrigued to know how nature and the climate crisis influenced the authors’ process. Here’s JR Carpenter on their collection Measures of Weather.

How and where do you write? Do you have a particular rhythm or routine? 

I think of writing as an active engagement with the world, through language. This engagement takes the form of observation, a sustained practice of attention. The words ‘noticing’ and ‘noting’ come from the same place. Noticing is a way of knowing the world. Noting is a way of marking that knowing. It doesn’t matter what form the notes take. Note book. Notes app. My camera roll is FULL. As are my pockets, with rocks and seeds, which also count as notes. The space between noticing and noting is where the real writing happens. Everything else is editing. Editing is always easier if you have an excess of material to work with, so I make lots of notes and then edit whenever I time — in between meetings, in the wee hours, and on trains. 

Do you take specific inspiration from the natural world, or the more-than-human, for your writing? 

I grew up on a farm. We didn’t have nature, we had seasons. Weather was a matter of life and death. Late frost and there goes the fruit crop. Rain before the hay’s in and it’s a lean winter for livestock. The day after wind sounds like chainsaws. Don’t get me started on aphids and weevils. There are 1.2 billion insects on Earth per human. More-than-human is a baseline for all ecological thought. Eco-poetry calls upon interdisciplinarity to interrogate the world through a self-reflexive critique of its own position in the world, creating shifts in thinking by continuously rethinking subject positions and the language that renders them. What even is human is subject to change. 

How are you influenced by other poets, writing about nature?

I often work with found language from historical texts, so for me, reading is a big part of writing. I always tell my students: you’re not really reading unless you’re reading with a pencil. Or highlighter. Or keyword search. Or whatever. Much of my reading comes from outside poetry. For years I taught a workshop called “Poets Plunder the Archives” at the Poetry School and at Cambridge. A number of poems in Measures of Weather engage with texts from early modern science. “Of Glass” for example, reworks an essay by Margaret Cavendish and “Of Air” reworks Robert Boyle’s General History of the Air. I used to say that I was searching for strangeness in this older language. Recently, a musician friend suggested I’m searching for how I sound. I’m still thinking about that. It might be the experimental part of science that I’m drawn to. Lisa Robertson’s collection The Weather has been a big influence, especially the way she draws out rhythms and repetitions from historical weather writing to reveal, revel in, and totally rewire the sincerity underpinning the English pastoral. I am in awe of Jordan Abel’s recent novel Empty Spaces, a radical reworking of the descriptions of nature in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans to explore what it means to be an intergenerational, Indigenous survivor of Residential Schools. Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas also uses experimental poetic processes to formulate a direct response to S.J. Res 14, a congressional apology and resolution to the native peoples of the United States. And Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance radically altered the way I think about settler colonial language and land relations.  

How did you approach themes of the environment and the climate crisis in this collection? 

Weather is happening here and now. Climate is bigger than that, longer, and more diffuse. Measures of Weather attempts to bridge this gap. The collection is about more than just weather. But what isn’t weather? Weather here is a stand-in, for the elemental, the transitional, the ungovernable. And what does it mean to measure? Throughout this collection I’m thinking about the colonial implications of collection and measurement that underpin climate research. I’m also looking to find intersections between disciplines, to articulate complex subject positions, to use language to make tangible changes in the material world, and to call attention to the invisible in all its myriad of forms, from the minuscule to the gigantic.  

Do you think that poetry is effective in conveying environmental messages/themes/solutions? 

I used to write fiction. Emigration fried my brain. Now I think in fragments, which is helpful for approaching such a vast topic as weather. Much of weather happens through the accumulation of small units — rain drops, snow flakes — and measure is preoccupied with the incremental, especially in relation to space and time. I’m not fussed about what is or isn’t poetry. I’m trying to use language as a medium to grapple with organisational structures and their failings, to think beyond the scale of the human body, to engage with a tangle of vast systems, to articulate the inchoate, to give shape to the ineffable, the transient, and the impossible. I hope that’s what comes across on the page.  

JR Carpenter is an artist, writer, researcher, and lecturer in the School of English at University of Leeds. Their work asks questions about place, displacement, climate, and colonialism, across performance, print, and digital media. Measures of Weather was The Observer’s poetry book of the month, February 2025. For more information please visit their website.