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Dr Rachel Robinson, Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Galway and Prof. Dr. Jenny Haase (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) organized last week a three-day symposium entitled “Poetic Matter: Poetry, Materialities and the Environment in Contemporary Hispanic Literatures” at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg in Halle (Saale), Germany. Participants from Germany, Ireland, Belgium, the UK, Chile and Argentina explored connections between and ontologies of language and environment as material in 20^th- and 21^st-century Spanish and Latin American poetry. The symposium included a provocative poetry reading by participants in Halle’s Literaturhaus and an exclusive visit to Halle’s Moritzburg Museum’s archive of the works of Chilean visual poet Guillermo Deisler, who lived in exile in Halle as a result of Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The conference was graciously funded by the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation, the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg and the University of Galway’s School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.