Cirrus@Austlit

'Dear Derek

'Apologies for the lateness of this letter.

'You would have liked that joke. I can actually hear you laughing. Or rather, coughing your lungs out. Like most of the jokes you liked best in your last few years, it would have sent you into what sounded like mortal paroxyms of pulmonary distress, until you subsided into grim satisfaction, repeated the joke all wrong, then asked to hear it again. This is one less thing to worry about, as well as one less thing to love, for, as you wrote along ago: ‘I shall see love reclaim its things as I lie dying.’' (Introduction)

'For over twenty years, conflicting claims in the construction of identity have been central to the problems of re-defining autobiography. Elizabeth Bruss (1976) referred to autobiography as a literary practice that is in continuous flux. Georges Gusdorf (1980) problematised the relationship between subjective and objective memory in autobiography. Paul Eakin (1992) drew attention to the shifting boundaries between fact and fiction in self-representation. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2001) argued that autobiographical writing assigns both singular and multiple subject positions to the representation of identity. Contemporary experimental poetry inflected by the autobiographical drive actively engages these conflicting issues within the context of autofiction. In this paper, I touch upon the relationships between autobiography and fiction and poetry to explore how different modes of representation raise questions regarding the construction of identity. I will focus on my own work, specifically on the composition of Hush: A Fugue (Hecq 2017), first written as a novel, then as a memoir and, finally as cross-generic text. Because the paper revisits the composition of a work which took over two decades to write, it is written in inductive mode, only arguing its point by allusion and accretion in order to highlight the speculative departures at work in the process. These speculative departures, or fugal alternatives, concern the discrepancy between the reading ‘I’ and the writing ‘I’ on the one hand, and the theorist and ‘the breathing author’ on the other. These alternatives are shown to underscore the active character of identity formation in the writing process and the retrospective nature of (embodied) knowledge.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper argues that recent post-internet poetry has seen a return to a ‘confessional’ self, distributed across various forms of social media. Using my current manuscript-in-progress Newcastle Sonnets as an exemplar, it also considers the relationship between real and virtual places, in this case the city of Newcastle, NSW.' (Publication abstract)

'In recent years we have seen an explosion of trans memoirs, but relatively few of these have a poetic sensibility or include poetry. In this paper I will extend the concept of ‘transpoetics’, first coined by trans writer and poet T.C. Tolbert in his edited collection Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (2013), who said in a recent interview that poetry meant ‘I could do things in language and create a world for myself that I didn’t know how to inhabit with my body’. I will posit that transpoetics carries all the markers of a dialogic form, despite the fact that Bakhtin privileged the novel over poetry and poetics, claiming that poetry could only ever be monologic. I then discuss Butler’s notion of performativity alongside Jay Prosser’s interventions against using the trans body as metaphor to destabilise gender norms, and finally meditate on drag, the practice of reading, and look at transpoetics as chronotope. By placing this work alongside my own autobiographical prose poetry, this paper also performs a heteroglossic, ‘both/and’ writing of the queer and trans body.' (Publication abstract)

'In 2011 I began the job of working with ‘un-Australians’ in ‘un-Australia.’ Teaching asylum seekers on Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands over the next three years became a border crossing of my own. As I heard story after story of suffering and overcoming, I began to hear a larger narrative that spoke to what it meant to be human, a story in which I found myself implicated. At the same time, large tides on Cocos meant other binaries like land and sea were blurred daily by the ocean’s dynamic movements. In all that flux I lost my father to cancer, and it was at this juncture I turned to poetry. In this paper I will explore how tidalectics and critiques of insularity informed a body of poetry that became a process of counter-imagining, helping me find my way back to ‘others’ and a world I thought I knew.' (Publication abstract)

'The prose poem, Silliman notes, is ‘perfect for hallucinated, fantastic and dreamlike contents, for pieces with multiple locales and times squeezed into few words’ (1989: 81). This, he argues, is because the quotidian nature of prose is often unexpectedly subverted by encounters with the magnificent. This paper uses Silliman’s assertion as a starting point to discuss the way in which the American tradition of surrealist prose poetry employs recurring demotic elements – such as dalliance and anecdotes – to introduce the extraordinary. This, in turn, creates a comic or absurdist dimension in such works, underscoring one of the paradoxes at the heart of the prose poetry form. We argue that the coupling of the quotidian with the surreal in prose poetry creates and exploits a comic tension, focusing the reader on the impossibility of objectivity and adding a piquant playfulness to the serious issues such poems canvass. This paper will discuss prose poems by American prose poets Russell Edson and Charles Simic. It will also briefly analyse three Australian prose poems. These works indicate that surrealist prose poetry in Australia tends to be focused on a fusing of the laconic with the savage in its in its appeal to humour.' (Publication abstract)

'Poet Alice Notley once remarked, ‘like many writers I feel ambivalent about words, I know they don't work, I know they aren't it’ (Notley 2010: n.pag.). Over centuries, in both East and West, poets, mystics, philosophers, and worshippers have developed a semantics of negation—apophasis—to deal with what lies beyond language, to draw closer to uttering what cannot be said. As part of my PhD research I am experimenting with apophasis as a poetic strategy, exploring representations (in both poetic form and content) of absence through space, silence, and denial. Taking Notley’s statement as a reference point, this paper contemplates, from a practitioner perspective and through examples of my creative work, the idea that every poem is an attempt to write into the unsayable. ' (Publication abstract)

'This paper presents a cross-disciplinary collaborative project between a poet and a book artist. A site-specific residency project in 2014 for MoAD in Old Parliament House, Canberra, gave rise to two other publishing artifacts: a chapbook (for a poetry audience) and an artists’ book (for a visual arts audience). The collaboration produced original poems, ‘cut-ups’ composed from in situ sources, poems composed of key-word anagrams, and erasure poems sourced from Hansard speeches and newspaper articles from the year 1962. 

Each mode of publication offers different affordances for the source texts, offering them variable states of print-performance. The project also explores poetry’s relationship to public culture and institutions and the language these use. The poetic component in the project is an exercise in re-voicing and speaking back to the concept of a parliament, while the artistic component of the project is an exercise in close reading, both of the space itself and of the words inside it.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay emerges as practice-based research generated by my own writing of ekphrastic poetry. It aims to articulate a poetics of diaspora engendered by this practice and its triggers, contexts, dynamics and strategies. In an investigation of questions about ekphrasis raised by literary criticism, the essay considers a network of traditional historical, literary and theoretical approaches, and debates about its validity. It also revisits the sources of ancient ekphrasis in oral delivery and the medieval meditative practices of ekphrasis. Medieval oral and rhetorical reading and delivery focuses on the effect of ekphrasis upon the mind and feelings of the reader or listener, a feature feasibly linked to contemporary ekphrasis as practice, voice and performance. This essay illustrates the emphasis on the workings of creative mind through an example and commentary on the composition of one of my own poems, where the contexts of its writing – of migration, memory, ambivalence and temporal displacement – have significance for the development of a poetics of diaspora practice.' (Publication abstract)