Cirrus@Austlit

'On 25 May 2011, the Australian Poetry Library website (www.poetrylibrary.edu.au) was launched at Government House, Sydney, by the Governor of New South Wales, Her Excellency Professor Marie Bashir. The launch was the culmination of several years of work by a number of individuals, a process that inevitably involved many creative judgments, as well as many adjustments along the way.' (Publication abstract)

'The passage of Cyclone Bingiza through the Indian Ocean is a pretext for reflection on practices of judgment, including creative judgment. Judgment is a way of ‘getting a perspective’ and yet it also may come as a flash in creative work. The sudden irruption of strangeness happens as one register of the real is illuminated by a sudden visitation. If one abandons ‘perspectivism’ in a world seen as swirling with multiple realities, then one comes a step closer to being able to write with those realities on their terms, as opposed to about them across a culture/nature divide.' (Publication abstract)

'This discussion explores deflection as a narrative tactic for memoir writing, based on using material objects as sites of subjectivity. As a way of grounding this discussion, I employ the example of my own brief memoir ‘Antidote’, a fictionalised account of a collector and his collection, which provides the foundation for the story. In ‘Antidote’ I approach my account obliquely, as a restorative inventory. As I argue, however, it is not only the process of writing and remembering that provides a source of renewal. Rather, the objects themselves offer a mechanism of restoration. While imbued with ambiguity, they are an anchor against the constant slippage between the old world and the new. Roland Barthes has argued that the material details of a story can never denote the real: ‘all that they do … is to signify it’ (1989: 148) In ‘Antidote’ the assembled objects, the place that holds them and the collector who gathered them all exist. Even so, arguably, it is the selection and provenance of these objects, whether known or unknown, and their framing in language, that bring them into the realm of fabula and give narrative life to their form.' (Publication summary)

'This essay proposes the term ‘poetry soundtrack’ for a form of sounded poetry that I have been practising for some years (examples of which can be found in this issue of Axon). The poetry soundtrack is a sonic object made up of original poetry, music, and sound design. Such a form is now being produced—under various names—by numerous poets, thanks to the development of the Digital Audio Workstation (or DAW). In my essay, I argue that the poetry soundtrack has occupied an aesthetic no man’s land between avant-garde ‘sound poetry’ and documentary-style recordings of poetry readings. I propose that a general ‘fear of music’ has led critics to favour such forms, and concomitantly to ignore musico-poetic forms of sounded poetry. In addition, I analyse the ‘digital poetics’ that can be found in producing sounded poetry with a DAW, especially with regard to the ‘vocal staging’ that such technology can produce in the poetry soundtrack. (Publication abstract)