Cirrus@Austlit

'Found poetry borrows from other writers – from different writings, artefacts, and sources – always attributing and referencing accurately. In this paper, regional daily newspapers and their front page headlines are privileged as primary texts, the Found Poetry performing as nonfiction lyrical collage, with applied rules, nestling beside them.

'Considering the notion that contemporary poetry ‘inhabits language’, this paper uses three forms of Found Poetry – erasure, free-form and research – to test and demonstrate both literally and metaphorically, its veracity. Implicitly nonfiction, these poems create a nuanced and rhythmic lineated transcript of Australian life, derived from regional legacy newspapers, while they endure. Furthermore, using a comparative textual method, the aesthetics of Found Poetry is established visually.

'This paper is the second in a series derived from the beginnings of a research project into Australian legacy newspaper stories and Found Poetry. The first was a sequence of prose poems; this second collection is lineated and contributes to the notion of poetry mediating and enriching our understanding of the reality of the everyday.' (Publication abstract)

'Dating from the late fourteenth century the noun ‘inhabitation’ denotes the ‘act or fact of dwelling;’ but also a ‘state of being’ and a ‘place of lodging’ or ‘abode’ from the Old French habitacion or abitacion ‘a dwelling or act of dwelling’ (12^th century). It might also come directly from the Latin habitationem, the nominative case of habitation, ‘a dwelling,’ a noun of action from the past participle stem of habitare whose common Latin root is the past participle of the verb ‘to live, inhabit, dwell,’ the frequentative of habere ‘to have, to hold, possess.’ A most unstable term which must have arisen when the need was felt for an abstract term to express the ideas of making a home, and, by extension, populating. It is a rich word, conjuring as it does notions of occupancy, residence, ownership, control, possession, but also antithetical ideas of pre-occupancy or co-occupancy or post-occupancy, as in the fact of haunting and the state of being haunted. Like Freud's ‘Unheimliche’ (2001 [1917-1919]), ‘inhabitation’ highlights the unstable boundary between the familiar and the strange as well as the porous nature of the membrane between the inner and the outer. This paper will approach the following question: as a writer, do I inhabit language, or does it inhabit me? I will do so with specific reference to ‘Air: Dreamwork of a novel’ and ‘Masks,’ two works concerned with dialogical authorship and heteronymy.' (Publication abstract)

'But most often someone writing a poem believes in, depends on, a delicate, vibrating range of difference, that an ‘I’ can become a ‘we’ without extinguishing others, that a partly common language exists to which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images. A language that itself has learned from the heartbeat, memories, images of strangers. (Rich 2003: 86)

'The New leaves writing project was designed to provide people experiencing life-threatening illnesses the poetic tools to help gain self-confidence, literary skills and some kind of aesthetic satisfaction by creating their own poems. Because poetry often utilises the language of the subconscious, it has a unique capacity to help people uncover and listen to the deeper meanings of their lives (Harrower 1972; Mazza 1999). Poetry enables people to feel their lives, rather than to withdraw, or retreat into emotional numbness or states of paralysis in times of crisis. Participants in our project found writing poetry helped build an interior space and – when undertaken in a group led by Judith Beveridge, who is an experienced practitioner – connect their work to a wider community. This article focuses on the ways in which the creation of metaphors and symbolic images enabled New leaves poets to represent the knowledge and experience of illness while moving dialogically from an isolated ‘I’ to a connected ‘We’ by participating in the workshop and publication process.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper is an exploration of the validity of the writing of haiku by non-Japanese poets (NJP), addressing the question of the extent to which it is possible or necessary for NJP to maintain thehaiku spirit of its Japanese origins. Commentary from various Japanese scholars and poets, recent and past, as well as Western writers, will be examined as part of an argument positing that the essential nature of haiku, going back as far as Matsuo Bashō, has always been about change and development, and that the taking up of the form across the globe is a natural and valid part of this development.' (Publication abstract)

Lyric poetry is an affective art: it engages with emotional experience, and seeks to communicate an experience to others, through the deft use of all the technical means available to the poet. The peculiar agency of the lyric poem has been formulated in myriad ways over time by poets and philosophers alike. John Hollander cites Pseudo-Longinus on this effect: ‘by the blending of its own manifold tones it brings into the hearts of the bystanders the speaker’s actual emotion…’ (Hollander 1985: 7). The New Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics (1993: 713) defines the lyric poem as one in which musical elements, perceptions and the intent to communicate emotion and thought are brought together indivisibly in the fabric of the poem:

[t]he musical element is intrinsic to the work intellectually as well as aesthetically: it becomes the focal point for the poet’s perceptions as they are given a verbalized form to convey emotional and rational values.

'This essay proposes that recent philosophical, neuroscientific and psychotherapeutic research into the nature and experience of resonance and attunement provides a way of understanding the specifically emotional effects of a lyric poem on a reader. The phenomena of resonance and attunement, newly understood, have also begun to clarify the interpersonal nature of the space such poetry inhabits.'  (Publication abstract)

'This essay points to ways that three writers, Gertrude Stein, Inger Christensen and Frank O’Hara, have written about or towards objects or things. Of course, poems themselves are things and to some extent I will deal with this as well. But, mostly, I will consider how these poets:

resist, rethink or refresh materiality, representation and signification, as especially seen in Stein or trace materiality – as particularly seen in Christensen – through objects as systems of objects or locate things/objects as affinities within the present and social, as O’Hara does

'I offer these thoughts as simply small points of contact in thinking about these much- studied writers.' (Publication abstract)

'This article explores ways in which our collaborative work of fiction, ‘Dwellings’ – also published in this issue of Axon – uses Luce Irigaray’s assertion of the importance of speech as a starting point to explore the experiences of young women navigating the perils of gender relations within patriarchy. The work employs poetic prose juxtaposed with truncated prose fragments to create overlapping stories that comment analogically and obliquely on one another. The intersecting narrative strands reveal the limited power accorded to female adolescents and children in a patriarchal society, even as they attempt to subvert and defy patriarchy’s encompassing social and moral structures. The work comments on the importance of language in achieving agency and on ways in which young women may construct or articulate new and alternative realities.'  (Publication abstract)

'The original poetry in this hybrid critical/creative paper seeks to find acts of making that are equivalent or complementary to those of other art forms and to construct poems which respond not just in their content but in their structures, leading to a radical ekphrasis. It argues that this strategy makes for invigorated writing. The topic of ekphrasis finds numerous references in the literature of the last thirty years, but definitions of ekphrasis have narrowed since the term’s use in ancient times. It now has a particularly close association with the visual arts. It was formerly widely understood as a poetic response to any other form of art (Francis 2009), with no special importance placed on the visual work of art (Webb 2009: 11), but rather with a general ability to make a scene vivid. These poetic experiments attempt to balance the modern impetus to respond ekphrastically with the ancient understanding; they react to works of graphic design, journalism, Indigenous painting, as well as sculpture and installations, and notional ekphrasis. These poetic experiments explore Olson’s dictum that form is never more than an extension of content (1972: 338) and Hejinian’s equally important idea that ‘form is not a fixture but an activity’ (1983), and end by evaluating how the intention to find new structures has affected the content of the poetry.'  (Publication abstract)

'Sound is essential to poetry and poetry is an essential element of human language. As a simultaneous trilingual engaged in the study of multilingual poetic expression, I will use the development of my own plurilingual poetic ‘instinct’ to map the location of poetry within and between languages. I argue that poetry does not grow out of language so much as inhabits the basic aural building blocks of language, the potential for it existing always just beneath the surface of speech. This is tested by examining multilingual poetry as well as translations of poetry across languages to see what is lost and what emerges.'  (Publication abstract)

'This is a pilot paper, and the beginning of a much larger exploration of the genre, which seeks to map fisherpoetry in three ways: first, performing a review of the literature on fisher-poets, and then taking up Han’s definition of the ‘hospitable listener’, and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a ‘minor literature’, it works towards defining the genre. It then moves on to consider fisherpoetry as a mode of communication, that is a kind of functional tool used by fishermen to establish community via the ship radio. Developing this idea further I assess how women and queer fisherpeople have been able to use poetry to gain representation in an already under-represented culture and lifestyle.' (Publication abstract)