AustLit
Latest Issues
Notes
-
Includes poetry by Elisabeth Murawski; Katharine Coles; Alvin Pang, Elizabeth Smither; Philip Gross
Presentations by Philip Gross, Katharine Coles
Essays by Ross Gibson; Niloofar Fanaiyan
Contents
-
Out of the Darkness : Poetry, Memorial and the Black Saturday Bushfires,
single work
criticism
'This paper looks at poetry as a response to the bushfires that devastated Victoria on February 7, 2009 and its capacity to ‘hold’ what cannot be said, and yet must be said, when no other language will do. In the disaster there is trauma and transformation. Yeats says it best: that out of the darkness a ‘terrible beauty’ is born (‘Easter, 1916’). (Publication abstract)
-
The Prose Poem as Igel : A Reading of Fragmentation and Closure in Prose Poetry,
single work
criticism
'This paper takes up Nikki Santilli’s lament about the scarcity of scholarship on the prose poem in English to analyse two key features of prose poetry: fragmentation and closure. This paper argues that the prose poem’s visual containment within the paragraph form promises a complete narrative while simultaneously subverting this visual cue by offering, instead, gaps and spaces. Such apertures render the prose poem a largely fragmentary form that relies on metonymic metamorphoses to connect to a larger, unnamed frame of reference. In this way, the prose poem is both complete and yet searching for completeness, closed and lacking closure.
'The prose poem’s reaching outwards to embrace a larger, absent whole connects this literary form to Friedrich Schlegel’s ‘Athenaeum Fragment 206’ and to the Romantic critical fragment more generally. ‘Athenaeum Fragment 206’ has provided this paper with its title, as a metaphorical reading of Schlegel’s igel, or hedgehog, as fragment ‘implies the existence of [a form that suggests] what is outside itself’ (Rosen 1995: 48). The final section of this paper, analyses two prose poems from the University of Canberra’s International Poetry Studies Institute’s Prose Poetry Project. These works by Jen Webb and Carrie Etter are read for their appeal to metonymy in their exploration of time passing and ultimately, death. They demonstrate that prose poetry is both fragmented and open ended in ways very different from lineated poems.' (Publication abstract)
-
Door Into the Dark : Laurence Sterne’s Black Page—and Beyond,
single work
criticism
'When Sydney’s Daily Telegraph marked the death of cricketer Phillip Hughes in 2014 with a full black page, it added to the catalogue of works relating to Laurence Sterne’s black page in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman that marks the death of Parson Yorick (p.73 of Vol. I of the original edition). The black page may be a meditation on absence but it also evokes—through that absence—the world of light in which a character played his or her part. With reference to The Black Page catalogue published by the Laurence Sterne Trust in 2010, which featured commissioned works by 73 writers and other artists, the author here describes his own contribution and explores how other artists’ multimedia works have approached the challenge of depicting light where apparently there is none.' (Publication summary)
-
A Visual Tone Poem : Exploring the Conservatism of Contemporary Data Visualisation in Poetry,
single work
essay
''This paper is an ekphrastic response to claims made for the revolutionary intersection between data visualisation and poetry. The paper is a ‘visual tone poem’ which enacts its argument beyond the confines of traditional analytical writing so as to explore the ‘vernacular’ of data visualisation as a type of an avant guarde poem. The paper focuses on a case study of work from a data visualist and a poet. Using Radcliffe-Brown’s ‘anarchy’ move in anthropology to describe culture as a unified whole, this paper argues that that joking relationship evident in the case study is a reconstitution of existing power structures. In this way the claimed radicalism of the data visualisation is in fact deeply conservative.' (Publication abstract)
- Blinded by the Night, single work criticism
-
A Dark/Inscrutable Workmanship : Shining a ‘scientific’ Light on Emotion and Poiesis,
single work
criticism
'Poetry has a long history of being associated with irrationality and mental illness, especially in the sciences. This paper begins by engaging with Max Nordau’s fin-de-siècle physiognomic study of ‘degenerate’ artists, in which the poetic utterances of the Symbolists are theorised in terms of atavistic emotionalism. This paper concurs that emotion is indeed central to poiesis, though it contests the pathologisation of both emotion and creativity still present in many scientific studies of the arts, mobilising contemporary theories of embodied cognition to redeem emotion as a central if neglected dimension of healthy cognition. In fact, further contesting the enduring myth of the mad poet, this paper ultimately argues that the emotions that inform poetry are often ‘professionally’ affected for their generative potential.' (Publication abstract)
- The Day David Bowie Diedi"On the day David Bowie died, I was in Oxford,", single work poetry
- The Art of Birds, sequence poetry
- Golden Pheasantsi"Nature invented art,", single work poetry
- Mallardsi"with sequined green heads,", single work poetry
- Glossy Ibisi"So eerily red —", single work poetry
- Lady Amherst’s Pheasantsi"True aristocrats —", single work poetry
- African Greysi"They snub pleasantries,", single work poetry
- Corellai"She swoops in, close to", single work poetry
- Bleeding-heart Pigeoni"A crimson stab-wound", single work poetry
- Greater Bird-of-Paradisei"Once, on boughs near clouds,", single work poetry
- Azure-winged Kookaburrai"An old chuckler with", single work poetry
- Baby's Breathi"They had known each other since high school.", single work poetry
- Divinationi"The falls pour a map of rivers on his back.", single work poetry
- Busi"why, when I catch the bus, do I share it with old women and not with old men? are the old men still", single work poetry
