Cirrus@Austlit

'This special issue of JEASA represents the manner in which literature carries life with it, the manner in which literature upends, or explicates the “entangled significance” (van Dooren 7) of our days. It is aimed at exploring how poetry is experienced, revised, lived, analysed, enunciated, performed and measured in our everyday life. The issue is a collation of commissioned and happenstance interventions. In sending the call for submissions out to various friends for scholarship, the details provided were vague; I asked them that they submit something which demonstrated their excitement, to write on something that compelled them in their reading and in their scholarship. The responses received demonstrate a flourishing engagement with Australian writing at the very heart of our intellectual community, and attest to the possibilities of Australian scholarship and the communities of thought developed here. This work evidences the various ways we attend to the complex and ethical significance of poetry, of writing that makes meaning in the world, and the scholarship we are publishing today generates distinctive encounters with the material of language.'

Source: Introduction.

'This article considers the linguistic structures of Lionel G. Fogarty's poetry as consciously reflecting processes of language acquisition and relexification and posits the speaking subject as a condition of forced transculturation. Utilizing Fogarty's "Disguised, not attitude" and "Bam Gayandi" as primary examples, I will seek to substantiate an argument that the "forced poetics" of Fogarty's poetic historicity is made manifest through an intermediated subject. As I conceive of it, the intermediary subject is one in which poetic intelligence is split between the aggressively interiorized and the distant other of the self (Sutherland, "Blocks" 00:22:00–00:24:00). This subjective identity is structured on Australian Indigenous culture and history, including "archives of character, genealogies of cultural memory, [and] histories of the present" (Minter 259) in which identity is latently or implicitly conceived. As Fogarty writes across and outside national traditions, linguistic disobedience is expressed through the embedding of Indigenous languages and language systems within poems ostensibly written in English. While emphasizing diverging and often conflicting energies within the poetics, these linguistic features of his work are often critically analyzed via notions of contrariety, without critics giving due consideration to processes through which asymmetries in cultural, linguistic, and ethnic exchange are foregrounded. The contention that this essay will advance is that the expression within Fogarty's poetics bears witness to and records the events and processes of "forced transculturation," functioning within the parameters of a linguistically experimental literature.' (Introduction)

'Situating the poems ‘Won’t You Daddy?’ and ‘Seeds of Thought’ against Gilbert’s contribution to Imagining the Real, this essay will critique nuclear threats to Country as intertwined with racial power-structures, and as dependent upon the same genocidal logic as Australian colonisation. The nuclear imaginary, as identified by Gilbert, corresponds to a death event which is informed by and itself substantiates relations of subjugation for Indigenous people. It is the contention of this paper that the thematic focus on nuclear weaponry and the nuclear imaginary as present in Kevin Gilbert’s poetry—as well as his contemporary, Kath Walker—has contributed to a poetry-based, media ecology through which nuclear threats to Country are an inherited focus of Australian Indigenous poetry.' (Publication abstract)    

Author's note:      for martina
 

'This book was written over two hundred years. It was started as a colonial project. From there it developed through the use of the archive as a consideration of historical narrative. The poem employs a Susan Howe-esque archival practice that selectively disseminates Canadian short stories to think about erasure and failures of settlement: to disclose an underlying colonial reality of the pastoral, and measures of inclusion and exclusion. The poems are familial but underlying this is the glowering absence of the historic, a generative absence which exemplifies how early / prairie literature is culpable in driving a national myth which forgoes Indigenous life.

'As a child I was fascinated with rope-braiding machines. Even before I could manage the handle, I could watch them for hours. I consider tension as a form of kinetic energy. Words from archives are interwoven, assembled to mimic this type of tension. These narratives are bound to the manner in which we write the histories of our nation. We are all of these stories, and they are none of us. This rope can be used to bind, or …' (Publication summary)

'Anupama Pilbrow studies mathematics at The University of Melbourne. In 2014, her poetry collection was shortlisted for the Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize and her stories, poetry and artwork have been published in Cordite Poetry Review, Rabbit Poetry Journal, CUL-DE-SAC and Farrago. She received the 2016 Dinny O'Hearn Fellowship for her poetry manuscript the ravage space, a work dealing with Asian diasporic experience in Australia. Pilbrow's work is at once political, dialogic, lithe and anchored around the opaque exchange of linguistic structures. The poems included here focus on corporeality, on bodily passages, and transitions; on the certainty of uncertainty.' (Introduction)