Cirrus@Austlit

'In 2012, I stood at the window of the Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza and marvelled at the people dodging traffic to get a photo of themselves on the X where the fatal bullet hit JFK on his motorcade. Years later, I read Malcolm Foley and J John Lennon’s article, ‘JFK and Dark Tourism’ and understood that I had visited the quintessential dark tourist site identified in their study.' (Publication summary)

'This essay presents an extension to theorisations of ekphrasis by introducing to this topic of research a cognitive approach to the process of creative writing. An ekphrasis poem would not come into being without an external object, image or art work. Although a draft can be produced in the space of ‘seeing’ and writing, there are many implicit and unstated associations and processes (half-registered, or not conscious at all, but still there) in the space between the engagement with art work or object and the act of writing.

'The writing of the poem involves numerous interactions with the externalised cognitive object/thought, but also with what is cognitively implicit as the creative response starts to take shape in the mind and on the drafted page; the almost immediate engagement with language and embodied actions of writing. This engagement with the visual object constitutes an intimate, complex cognitive system. Drawing on theories of enactive and embodied cognition, memory, language as thought, and Tim Ingold’s work on ‘correspondences’ in cognition of the world, the essay also argues for the power of the imagination and memory in the writing of ekphrasis poetry.' (Introduction)

'In Australia, poetry related to scientific topics (‘science poetry’) is an emerging subgenre of writing. While poet Carol Jenkins has previously described the demographics of contemporary Australian poetry in the literature, no known quantitative research studies have focused on contemporary Australian science poetry. Therefore, our novel study aims to describe the demographics and characteristics of contemporary Australian science poetry. After independently reviewing twelve poetry or science writing anthologies to identify science poems, we jointly selected pieces for data collection. Categorical data on poem and poet characteristics were collected, with proportions in categories expressed as percentages and residential state/territory figures re-expressed per million population. The number of poets with science rather than non-science poems anthologised was statistically compared between genders using a chi-square test, with a p-value<0.05 denoting statistical significance. Across the anthologies, 100 science poems by 73 poets were identified. The most common poetry type and scientific discipline were free verse (93%) and biology (30%), respectively. Poets mostly used science to explore ideas of humanity and death. They were mainly female (55%) NSW residents (41%) with no formal science background (75%). The ACT had the most poets per million population (15). Women were significantly more likely to have science poems anthologised compared with non-science poems. Overall, our study of contemporary Australian science poetry provides a picture of an interdisciplinary genre and suggests avenues for future exploration.' (Publication abstract)

'Poetry has the capacity to allow many voices to speak and this is what makes the verse novel a unique form through which limiting understandings of the teenage experience can be challenged. Robert Petrone, Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides and Mark A Lewis seek to re-vision the assumptions that young people in general are naïve, self-interested, moody, hormonal, volatile, and risk takers. They have therefore introduced the term Youth Lens (Petrone et al 2014). This critical lens offers an approach to literary representations of adolescents and young adults that challenges ‘reductive, deficit views of young people; and [conceptualises] youth as complex, contradictory individuals, not fully determined by the body’ (ibid: 3). The multi-voiced verse novel enables explorations of real difference. An analysis of the multiple, distinct voices in Catherine Bateson’s poetic representations of adolescent experiences reveals the complexity of youth as a category. This paper will focus on how the voices in Bateson’s young adult verse novel His Name in Fire are made distinct through the lexicon and diction of the characters. An analysis of this text through a Youth Lens reveals that Bateson is attuned to a diverse range of personalities and experiences that constitute the category of youth.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay begins with an ethical quandary: the author’s academic institution had purchased some very expensive resources for her so that she could complete her research for a book-length verse-biography project on choreographer George Balanchine. The problem is, the resources arrived after she considered that project ‘complete’ (the book was in press). How might a creative practice researcher quash her guilt in this regard?

'The essay follows her process of reopening the project — as a more traditional biographer might do in order to produce a ‘revised’ edition — not only to integrate information from those new resources, but to revisit discarded research notes (the ‘refuse’) that did not yield poems within the initial publication. In assembling new versions of poems from the published book, the author reconsiders the biographical project as an ongoing, ever-evolving and ephemeral process, akin to the revision of ballet repertoire.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper examines the enmeshing of three themes: poetry's relationship to the real, intersection with and use of other disciplines, and its rendition of embodied knowledge(s). Drawing on the making of After Cage: A Serial Composition for our Time (Hecq 2019), the paper teases out the first two themes by focusing on the textual making of the work. Spawned by a response to global politics, the poem evolved through encountering a composer, a choreographer and a company of dancers. Research into avant-garde music gave the text its edge. The paper then turns back findings upon the premises put forward at the outset of the investigation by invoking the experience of sharing knowledge with a choreographer in the dancing of the poem in rehearsal and full production. It interrogates the process of revision and transformation experienced in both performance and theorising, drawing upon psychoanalytical and phenomenological resources.' (Publication abstract)