Cirrus@Austlit

'Jamming is one of those Janus-faced words that is its own contronym. Just as cleaving can refer to splitting things apart or uniting them together, to jam in jazz is to perform improvisational pieces with a whole band; but it also means to wedge shut, breakdown and, in the case of radio jamming, refers to a mode of saturating the airwaves with white noise or false information. In this two-part article, a British Australian poet and Indian American writer present a collaborative jam session which takes up all of these meanings through a work of linked verse that explores creative (dis)location, silence, white and black noise, and the impinging of multiple cultures on one's aesthetic imagination and physical identity in the world. Informing their individual and linked practices through the execution of this work is a reflection on the mode, process and tradition of collaborative poetic works. It argues the worth of a collaborative yet distanced practice, which may mirror the dislocation of spoken dialogue, but also magnifies the trust each participant places in each other, a trust intensified by the conceptual and linguistic risks taken.' (Publication abstract)

'In her latest, and strikingly titled book of poems, award-winning poet A Frances Johnson presents ‘anti-pastoral, anti-war poems’, and produces a body of work which ‘puns on the idea of a song lyric, translation, surrender and also torture’ (Melbourne Prize for Literature 2018).' (Introduction) 

'‘Poetry is an exile’s art,’ remarked American poet Charles Wright. ‘Anyone who writes it seriously writes from an exile’s point of view’ (Wright 2002: 27).

'What if a poet manages to capture not only the exile’s point of view but also the insider’s? What happens if those viewpoints converge?  In Glass, her latest collection of Australian-born, Mexico-based poet, Rose Hunter accounts for both perspectives, and limns their somewhat uneasy merger. The more miles the ‘i’ of the poems clocks up on the road and the more places she records, the less the destinations seem to matter, and the more interiorised the journey actually becomes.' (Introduction)

'Taking the form of a lyric essay, this paper reflects on innate synergies between apophasis and the poetic process, situated within a discussion of writing and dispossession, and points out the inherent (and for a writer) apparently insurmountable irony at the heart of apophasis. Apophasis is the term for the rhetoric of negation. It is derived from the Greek words phanai 'to say' and a prefix 'apo' which in this use means 'away from' (Gibbons, 2007). For many centuries, writers across the disciplines of philosophy, theology and poetry have traditionally used apophasis when attempting to “speak of” concepts or phenomena that either resist language or lie beyond human knowledge, such as the Divine. I engage with the issue of being 'lost to and for words,' both from a phenomenological and poetic perspective, and I reflect on how coming up against the limitsof language is, for the poet, at once desirable and problematic. Drawing from ancient and contemporary literary and theological texts such as The Mystical Theology by Pseudo-Dionsyius, the poetry of Rumi, and the writings of Alice Notley, among others, I argue that being 'lost to and for words' is a form of dispossession, though of whom, and by what, is open to conjecture. I propose apophasis as a useful framework within which to survey this conundrum, describing how it offers to a writer the potential for surprising and unexpectedly rich poetic and critical outcomes.'

Source: Abstract.