Paul Magee Paul Magee i(A70099 works by)
Born: Established: 1970 Melbourne, Victoria, ;
Gender: Male
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Works By

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1 The Strange Relation of Poetry to Place Paul Magee , 2024 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT Special Issue , no. 71 2024; 'The article analyses my interviews with a number of poets whose works seem to subvert space in various ways. I report my surprise in discovering, within those interviews, a tendency for the poets nonetheless to describe themselves and even their actual poems in national terms. C.D. Wright, for instance, referred in her interview to her having “an American ear,” in spite of her work’s seeming deconstruction of any such broad identities. This leads me to a discussion of the interpellative devices of the nation-state that serve to draw poets into ascribing a national identity to themselves and their work in a range of forums, up to and including the international research interview. But even granting the pervasive ideological mechanisms of the nation-state, it seems clear that the poets interviewed are genuinely reporting back on their experience of compositional work and its drivers, when according a role to the nation and/or geographic space they inhabit. The paper draws on developments in contemporary linguistics to suggest that what they are in fact naming is a localised idiom. It is that which serves to launch them into the kinds of spaces Emily Dickinson evoked, when avowing “I dwell in possibility / a fairer house than prose.” That fairer house – poetic possibility itself – is rooted in idiom.' 

 (Publication abstract)
1 R U? i "Paul asked Kazuki to try", Paul Magee , 2024 single work poetry
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2024;
1 Old Shed i "To transmit hair by radio.", Paul Magee , 2024 single work poetry
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2024;
1 Own i "Landscape written large above us", Paul Magee , 2024 single work poetry
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2024;
1 Dreaming in Bourke Paul Magee , 2024 sequence poetry
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2024; Meanjin , March vol. 83 no. 1 2024; (p. 196-199)
1 Carbon Neutral Conferencing : A Case Study in Poetics Paul Magee , 2023 single work essay
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , October vol. 27 no. 2 2023; 'The author was co-convener of the Australian Capital Territory’s first government- certified, carbon-neutral conference, Out of the Ordinary: On Poetry and the World, 5– 7 December 2022. This paper centres upon a case study of that conference, intended to serve as a model for future such events. Bookending that case study are two discussions. The first addresses recent scholarship on the internationalisation of the university sector and the conflict it poses to concurrent policy drives towards environmentally sustainable operations. The literature on sustainable conferencing reveals the extent of that conflict, but also contains many practical measures for staging responsible events that involve genuine emissions reductions. Some of those measures feature within the poetry conference case study: vegetarian catering, eradication of printed materials, free registration for Indigenous delegates, compulsory travel offsetting, deliberate regionalisation. A final section considers problems with the very idea of carbon neutrality – as a concept based in “net” accounting practices that equate measures intended to affect the removal of emissions with no emissions – in the interest of driving further change in our conferencing practices.' 

(Publication abstract)
1 Registers i "the dirt settles down", Paul Magee , 2023 single work poetry
— Appears in: Island , no. 169 2023; (p. 45)
1 ‘The Edge of Reality’ : Paul Magee in Conversation with Paul Collis, Jen Crawford and Wayne Knight Paul Magee , 2023 single work interview
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 September no. 110 2023;

'The idea is to compose a whole book by speaking it. Spoken on Barkindji and Nyemba Country by a Barkindji elder, academic and poet (Paul Collis), in dialogue with two white poet-academics (Jen Crawford, Paul Magee) and five local Barkindji, Kunya and Nyemba interlocutors (Gertie Dorigo, Bradley Hardy, Margaret Knight, Wayne Knight, Brian Smith), taped and transcribed, A Book that Opens provides a book-based archive of oral intellectual practice on Country along the Darling / Baarka River in outback New South Wales.' (Introduction)
1 Flag Mask i "A minister, Peter Dutton, said", Paul Magee , 2022 single work poetry
— Appears in: Overland , Spring no. 248 2022; (p. 66)
1 The House Is Moving i "Ex girlfriend is sad at news of ‘your tragic loss’ in Brazil.", Paul Magee , 2022 single work poetry
— Appears in: StylusLit , September no. 12 2022;
1 The Links between Creative Writing and Traumatic Thought Paul Magee , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: New Writing , vol. 19 no. 1 2022; (p. 27-37)

'The paper considers the personal determinants of quality in writing, by exploring poet Ted Hughes's proposition that ‘psychological crises' are necessary ‘to awaken genius in an otherwise ordinary mind.' Inspiration for this exploration is provided by the author's work as a creative writing mentor on a rehabilitation programme for injured and ill servicepeople. The experience of that programme is that participants will often produce compelling writing on the topics that have scarred them. Hughes's book Poetry in the Making provides some insights into why this might be the case, by suggesting that poetic composition is not a matter of close and professional consideration of the right words for any given topic, but rather emerges through an intensely-embodied imagining of one's subject matter. Hughes argues that when one acts out some subject matter vividly in one’s mind, the words emerge as if of their own accord, and with far more mimetic aptness. My argument is that the traumatized engage in such intense imagining as their very condition, and so end up doing the very thing Hughes recommends, when taking their trauma as their topic.' (Publication abstract)
1 Very Origins i "Beer in plastic cups in the once most bombed hotel in Europe", Paul Magee , 2021 single work poetry
— Appears in: Island , no. 163 2021; (p. 39)
1 Do You Really Have to Know the Rules to Break Them? On Teaching Creative Writing to Injured Servicepeople Paul Magee , Owen Bullock , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: Westerly , vol. 66 no. 1 2021; (p. 137-150)
1 X-ray at the Border i "Take this little bit of luggage, all I carry.", Paul Magee , 2020 single work poetry
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Anthology 2020-2021; (p. 145)
1 Seneca, 'Omnia Tempus Edaz Depascitur' ('Time Eats Everything Up) i "Time eats everything up - it snatches it all", Paul Magee , 2020 single work poetry
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Anthology 2020; (p. 61)
1 Alternative Futures for the Creative Writing Doctorate (By Way of the Past) Paul Magee , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , April vol. 24 no. 1 2020; 'This paper contributes to the project of mapping alternative futures for the creative writing doctorate, by way of deep excavation into the history of scholarly forms. A key aim is to undermine the apparent necessity of an exegetical component to any current creative writing doctoral portfolio. To this end, the paper attempts to think through those traditions of humanities scholarship that have long assumed the presentational forms of novelistic and poetic art. It has a specific eye to works in the post-structuralist tradition, in particular those of Michel Foucault, the scholarly writer whom Georges Canguilhem saw fit to label a ‘poet’ in the course of examining the doctorate that we would come to know as Histoire de la folie. The paper asks why that naming makes intuitive sense. A philosophical engagement with Anthony Grafton’s work on the form and origins of the footnote suggests that normative scholarly texts are ruled by a bifurcation between what is said and the story of how one came to say it, a story offered there at the bottom of the page, or in some other like apparatus or mode. The self-justificatory functions associated with the footnote are minimised in Foucault’s and his peers’ work, just as they are banished from art itself. In their place, if anything, we find strategies devised for the fomenting of doubt, that have the emotional and intellectual effect of making knowledge the responsibility of the reader. In other words, a form of creative intellectual work without exegetical documentation is not only possible in humanities scholarship, it is a feature of some of the most valorised work in the field. Could we not take our bearings from there?' (Publication abstract)
1 Out of Hospital i "From the sky the oceans", Paul Magee , 2020 single work poetry
— Appears in: Rabbit , no. 29 2020; (p. 46-47)
1 y separately published work icon TEXT Special Issue Website Series Making It New: Finding Contemporary Meanings for Creativity no. 40 Michael Biggs (editor), Kevin Brophy (editor), Monica Carroll (editor), Paul Magee (editor), Jen Webb (editor), 2017 11181505 2017 periodical issue

'Creativity is one of the important catchwords of the early 21st century. It is invoked by government, industry, and the academy, positioned as the motive force for economic and technological innovation, and widely claimed in the literature of business and organisational management as an explicatory concept and a key ingredient for success. It can be surprising to artists in all the many forms and modes of practice that a word we had long seen as ‘ours’ has so thoroughly and promiscuously slipped from our grasp. However, there is knowledge in all those other disciplines and domains that is potentially of value to creative writers, performing artists and plastic artists, as well as all our cousins in allied art forms.' (Monica Carroll and Jen Webb Introduction)
1 Play and the 'Native Ethnographer’ : A Case Study of Poets Interviewing Poets Jen Webb (interviewer), Kevin Brophy (interviewer), Paul Magee (interviewer), 2017 single work criticism interview
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , April vol. 7 no. 1 2017; 'Applying a ‘native ethnographer’ model to interviews collected as part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Understanding Creative Excellence: A case study in poetry, reveals that for poets, play is an end itself. The poets play for play. Using incidental aspects of the interview form, interviewer and interviewee, within the context of the interview occasion, undertake play as an end in itself. ' (Introduction)
1 Elif Sezen’s ‘Dear Immigrants’ and ‘The Turkish Bath’ Paul Magee , Elif Sezen , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 February no. 57 2017; 'I am reminded of Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth. For the work Salcedo broke a hairline crack into the floor of the Tate Gallery’s Turbine Hall. Running the sheer length of the hall, the crack broadened out to a crevasse of some feet. You walked alongside and gaped in. The floor was later repaired the cracks remain. So Elif Sezen’s ‘we / rather remain silent / as if ripping off the tree roots from its soil’. The effects of these words are quieter. But there’s a rent in the language of our familiar utterance – shouldn’t it be ‘ripping up’? – all the same. We rip off when deceiving others of their rightful share. And we find ourselves ripping tree roots off the soil in lands where there’s little for our plantations to take hold of. It’s dusty and even inimical to those with little history there, the rip-off merchants who in the state of Victoria, for instance, pioneered for the future nation the forcible removal of indigenous children from their families. The example spread, but the city of Melbourne is particularly built on it.' (Introduction)
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