Cirrus@Austlit

'‘What's open about an open relationship?’ Justin Clemens asked during his reading at the launch of The Open in 2021. This reminds me of an idea Slavoj Žižek touches on in The Metastases of Enjoyment (1994). The point was not about open relationships but about BDSM partnerships, where he writes: ‘What is of crucial importance here is the total self-externalisation of the masochist's most intimate passion: the most intimate desires become objects of contract and composed negotiation.’ Agreements that accompany erotic power games—as well as open relationships and relationships that broadly fall into the ‘consensual non-monogamy’ category—are often worked out with a microscopic scrutiny reserved for the pre-nuptial. What appears open is not always so. The low Australian skylines, the way earth and sky appear to embrace and melt into each other—the appearance of innocent and natural co-existence belies the ongoing reality of settler-colonial violence. Clemens’s provocation is a suitable apéritif for the poetic-philosophical experience that is Lucy Van's The Open.' (Introduction) 

'‘The actor is a heart athlete,’ Antonin Artaud wrote in 1958. He was writing about theatre, but I wonder if the same could be said of the poet. ‘To arrive at the emotions through their powers instead of regarding them as pure extraction, confers a mastery on an actor equal to a true healer’s. A crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct. To use emotions the same way a boxer uses muscles. To know there is a physical outlet for the soul. (93 – 95).'  (Introduction)

'Catching COVID-19 didn’t stop Sara Saleh from showing up to this discussion about poetry, place, and the place of poetry in the present moment. The exchange took place between 21 – 25 January 2022, quickly expanding into a 7,000-word conversation. The below interview reveals a condensed version of this chat without removing the essence of our exchanges.'  (Introduction)