Cirrus@Austlit

'This hybrid critical/creative paper addresses ekphrasis in an age characterised by short attention spans. It suggests that while ekphrasis is generally considered as arising from a poet’s close attention to an artwork -- the product of what psychologist Daniel Kahneman terms System 2 perceptions that require time -- and can in turn prompt the reader to return to an artwork with heightened attention, it can also represent the fleeting glimpse that characterises much of our sensory experience of the world around us and, indeed, art. Considering Owen Bullock’s idea of ‘radical ekphrasis’ in relation to Kahneman’s category of System 1 perceptions – that is, immediate response to stimuli -- this paper explores the possibilities of an ekphrasis of the transitory and concludes with an example thereof.' (Publication abstract)

'This article explores the emergent format of ‘parallel posts’ or ‘web weaving’, a practice of literary collage on blogging website Tumblr, and argues that they represent a new wave of poetry reception, unbound to formal literary education or to conventional spheres of cultural capital. Following Audre Lorde’s ‘Poetry is not a luxury’, I discuss parallel posts as a vital component of the broader digital literary sphere, a counterpoint to Instapoetry, and as a resurgence of commonplace book-keeping. I analyse the prevalence of users positioning poetry on Tumblr as akin to or superior to school-bound English education, and parallel posts as a humanist practice. I conclude by arguing that parallel posts represent a reclamation of poetry as a common resource and an ideology.' (Publication abstract)

'This piece adopts the voice of public declaration to assert poetic practice as survivable resistance to abuses of power. It proposes that poetry is the best means to identify, expose and reconfigure what is implicit in dominant discourses that discredit the way a survivor of sexual assault may communicate. It is found that a poetic use of language that is allusive, evocative and associative can reinvigorate annihilated perspectives so as to add them to public discourse. Poetic methods can be employed to resist and subvert the supposed supremacy of linear and logical narrative structures considered essential for sense making and validity. Furthermore, they can be employed to excavate family and state histories to resurrect, sometimes from fragments, the perspectives of those that have been silenced.' (Publication abstract)

'Much of my fiction and poetry has been a long wrestle with the Pythia, the prophetic snake at Delphi. A figure who slides in and out of consciousness. The mythic imagery associated with her includes Eurydice who is unable to leave the underworld. She represents the dislocation of the postseizure state and her return to status epilepticus. The poems and text in this essay are an attempt to write what is barely writable.' (Publication abstract)

'My writing research poses and responds to questions of how and why we might make stories about living and dying well with rabbits. I use Indigenous epistemology and elements of Donna Haraway’s SF figure (2016) to create stories grounded in relatedness for partial healing. These stories perform the Māori kawe mate, a rite that translates as ‘carrying the dead’. Stories are inherited and reconfigured. They are made with others, including the dead. I think with the rabbits of Bowen Bridge, and their progenitors. I carry their memory through visual images and spoken word.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper will consider the ways in which the poetic form echoes a visceral experience of embodiment that re-imagines the relationship between subject and object. Through a focus on poetic elements such as the rise and flow of line, the vital pauses of punctuation and white space together with the slip of association and metaphoricity, this paper contends that the lyric poem in particular not only recreates the experience of the respiring body but offers us an inhabited insight into an interplay of inside and outside, self and other, what sustains and what speaks. In this way, both poetry and breath can be seen to provide a deconstructued paradigm for subjectivity -- a subjectivity that emerges from the flow of overlap and connectedness rather than differentiation. In this sense, the poem speaks the body as well as the body speaking the poem. Informed by a conceptual framework that includes Thích Nhất Hạnh’s concept of ‘interbeing’ as well as Levinas’ notion of the face as it meets the breathing face of the other, this discussion references the work of eco-poet Anne Elvey in addition to my own poetry project, ‘Remarkable as Breathing.’' (Publication abstract)

'This essay puts forth Laurie Duggan’s decades-long serial poem, Blue Hills (1980–), as a radical antimythic and ecological approach to longform ‘epic’ poetics – or what I term the ‘ecological anti-epic’. The essay first reflects on the mythic ambitions of twentieth century Anglo-American modernist epic poets, such as Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, before turning to what I call the North American ‘antiepic’ postmodernist serial poem tradition. Centring on Robert Duncan’s Passages -- a key influence on Duggan’s own series -- I argue this ‘anti-epic’ approach to the long poem replaced the ‘mythical method’ (Eliot 1923: 483) of early modernist epics with a compositional method. Reading Blue Hills through the guiding principle of Duncan’s series, ‘grand collage’ (2014: 298), the essay then posits that Blue Hills -- as a localised re-deployment of Duncan’s grand collage method -- can be read as both a continuation, and subversive settler Australian reimagination, of the North American anti-epic serial poem tradition. Drawing on Peter Minter’s archipelagic approach to reading Australian poetry, Blue Hills is then read as a type of archipelago of poetic islands, one which challenges not only the epiccum-mythic ambitions of modernist longform poetry, but also the racially charged environmental myth-conceptions of early settler Australian poetic movements, such as the Jindyworobaks. I conclude with a brief reflection on the links between the process-based aesthetics of post-modern anti-epics and what Connor Weightman calls the ‘ecological long poem’ (2020: 3), ultimately positing that Duggan’s Blue Hills refutes the modernist penchant for speaking declaratively about the world and instead affects a sense that the world is reveling in its own wording.' (Publication abstract)