Cirrus@Austlit

'We present here an account of the way we employ the reading of poetry in engaging participants of an intensive four-week creative arts programme known as ARRTS (Arts for Recovery, Resilience, Teamwork and Skills) for wounded, ill or injured serving military personnel people with injury or illness, to prepare and assist them in writing their own stories. Poetry can deal with experience and perception in unique ways, as can haiku, which are invaluable for their accessibility and depth. The open qualities of our reading matter invite discussion and models the fact that poetry gives us permission to feel and to express ourselves. This discussion and engagement with readings is a key aspect of any prospective writer’s development, and, supplemented by the identification of specific techniques such as enjambment, creates awareness of ways in which it is possible to ‘re-author’ experience for healing effect.' (Publication abstract)

'Prosody involves the elements and techniques that attend to the making of poetry, even free verse poetry and hybrid poetic works. Prose poets may work with sentences and paragraphs rather than lines and stanzas, but they too value poetic techniques highly. These five chapbooks explore the relationship of prose poetry to various aspects of prosody. This occasions considerable inventiveness on the part of all contributors and results in a wide variety of moving and entertaining prose poetry.'  (Publication summary)

'Material poetics is not a new concept. The last century has seen the boundaries of creative genres dissolve, allowing attentiveness to materiality — once the exclusive concern of sculpture and craft — to pervade and tantalise less tangible practices. The development of a digital realm has not destroyed materiality, as originally feared, but served to foreground it; and the collaboration that can take place between digital and analogue, verbal and visual, is what drives this issue.' (Introduction)

'This article is co-authored by three writer-academics who have been collaborating as supervisors, doctoral candidates and co-authors over the past decade. Jen Webb supervised Jordan Williams during her creative PhD in digital poetry and Deleuze (awarded 2006); Jordan and Jen co-supervised Paul Collis’s creative PhD in fiction and Barkindji identity (awarded 2016); and he has long supervised both Jen and Jordan in their (informal) education in Indigenous epistemology. Over these years, the supervisor-candidate relationships have unfolded, developed, changed and folded back on themselves. We explore how this long-term relationship between three mature-aged writers and scholars, from three very different cultural backgrounds, has inflected our individual approaches to the preparation and writing of creative research, including the exegesis. We begin, therefore, with our own understandings of what the word ‘exegesis’ means to us, how it mobilised (or hindered) the generation of creative knowledge, what models are of value to us, and what we envisage as its possible future/s. We write this in the form of a three-way conversation, with scholarly annotations.'  (Publication abstract)