Cirrus@Austlit

'This paper explores poetry as a means of augmenting cross-cultural connections; we maintain that the genre is inherently humanistic, and that connecting with poets abroad and at large can be generative, exploratory, and invested in locating traits amid our differences that ulitmately draw us closer toward renewed ethical engagements. In a world that seems increasingly distracted by noise (often produced willfully, it seems, to ideological intent), poetry remains yet a means of intervening, interfering with, and interrupting the myopias of narrowed accounts of self, and self in relation to others. We argue that poetry can continue to make uncommonly useful contributions towards a common humanity: as our numerous inter-cultural projects demonstrate, to think poetically and connectively is to work non-reductively, in resonant ways that can shift us beyond the quotidian, into the boundlessly possible.' (Publication abstract)  

'Barrina and I connected in 2022 through Invisible Walls, a literary exchange program between Australian and Korean poets, co-facilitated by Dan Disney and myself. Invisible Walls poets were chosen via a competitive selection process. From a large pool of submissions, Barrina was one of twelve successful applicants. The striking language, imagery, and emotion of her poetry stood out immediately. Through working on the project itself, I came to know Barrina as not only a brilliant poet, but a deeply thoughtful, kind, and giving person, too. In late 2023, we met on Ngunawal and Ngambri Country (Queanbeyan, NSW) for a coffee and chat. Below is an edited transcript of our exchange.'  (Introduction)

'Samantha Faulkner is a writer and poet from Badu and Moa Islands in the Torres Strait and the Yadhaigana and Wuthuthi/Wuthati peoples of Cape York Peninsula. She is the author of Life B’Long Ali Drummond: A Life in the Torres Strait (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007) and editor of Pamle: Torres Strait Islanders in Canberra (Kuracca, 2018) as well as the forthcoming nonfiction anthology Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia (Black Inc, 2024). Faulkner has represented women and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander interests on local, state, and national boards and is a Director of the ACT Torres Strait Islanders Corporation. She is a current board member of both the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN) and Us Mob Writing Group, a Canberra-based First Nations writing collective.' (Introduction)

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'Alogia is a condition of reduced or absent speech. Poiesis is making. Alogopoiesis therefore forges a poetics of the unstated, a making of meanings from what’s not there. Poems in this book explore experiences of domestic violence, queer heartbreak, and mental illness, among other topics that are often hushed up or hard to voice. Surreal symbolism interweaves with bare personal accounts, prose poetry with flash fiction and lyric verse. Sequences of erasure, fragmentation and revision mobilise gaps and omissions as sites of significance. The book in entirety forms a macro-poem in which rhythms of repetition and variation continually reconfigure the parts that form the whole. The result is a speaking of silence through form acting as content, and thereby, a raising of issues for which greater attention is deserved.' (Publication summary)

'This paper is a collaborative reflection by four academic women using our creative writings about oceans and shorelines to think and reflect. We write from discrete locations along the Southern and Eastern coastlines of the invaded continent contemporarily known as Australia. Our methodology incorporates walking and creative writing. This walking-writing methodology has connected us to entangled feelings and lived experiences, including our embodied relationships with the ocean, our work in academia, and our rising levels of anxiety as climate change and related environmental crises coincide with our re-membering of oceans, bodies, rhythms and breath. To illustrate our re-membering, we intersperse fragments from our creative writing with reflective discussion. The social, environmental and political chaos surrounding us seeps into our processes, highlighting how neoliberal ideologies influence our inability to dis/connect, harming both human and beyond-human life. Through walking-writing, we seek to remember what we are losing and to imagine alternative futures.' (Publication abstract)

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'This paper presents an interdisciplinary dialogue between a cognitive scientist (Steven Langsford) and a researcher in the field of creative writing (Amelia Walker). The dialogue concerns a proposition that ecopoetry encourages people to become more open to mind styles that differ from their own and can thereby help support what Félix Guattari (1989) termed the mental ecology by facilitating interaction between people whose mind styles differ from one another. In contrast with models of evolutionary literary criticism that champion competition and selection, a Guattarian approach emphasises collaboration and variation, arguing the need for humans to work together with one another and with beyond-human beings to support diversity and thereby promote stronger possibilities for survival and wellbeing on the collective scale. A diverse mental ecology supports environmental sustainability and collective survival because it enables the raising and consideration of a broader range of approaches to problems including but exceeding environmental crises. The chapter connects these ideas with research concerning Bayesian inference, rational speech act (RSA) theory, and the benefits of strategy diversity in scientific communities.' (Publication abstract)

'This creatively-critical collaboration confronts issues of precarious employment in contemporary universities. As three early career academics currently employed on casual or fixed-term contracts in Australian universities, we have produced a writing-based fractography — a study of cracks — in order to show the effects of what Bill Readings has called ‘the ruined university’ on the bodies, minds, and lives of academic workers. To produce this work, each of us penned an individual narrative employing cracks as a metaphor for our lived experiences of working in academia. We then spliced the three separate accounts into fragments and combined them into a single text, interwoven with quotations from published sources. The quoted materials set the personal against the political, showing how our individual and particular experiences reflect specific but non-isolated instances of a much bigger, shared problem. Our polyvocal collaboration thus forms an instance of what Drager Meurtant describes in terms of ‘artistic assemblage’. In line with Cathryn Perazzo and Patrick West, we engage this approach in order to affect ‘non-didactic didacticism’ in our critique of the socio-political problems rife throughout academia today.' (Publication abstract)