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The Politics and Poetics of Paying Attention in Un-Australia single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 The Politics and Poetics of Paying Attention in Un-Australia
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In 2011 I began the job of working with ‘un-Australians’ in ‘un-Australia.’ Teaching asylum seekers on Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands over the next three years became a border crossing of my own. As I heard story after story of suffering and overcoming, I began to hear a larger narrative that spoke to what it meant to be human, a story in which I found myself implicated. At the same time, large tides on Cocos meant other binaries like land and sea were blurred daily by the ocean’s dynamic movements. In all that flux I lost my father to cancer, and it was at this juncture I turned to poetry. In this paper I will explore how tidalectics and critiques of insularity informed a body of poetry that became a process of counter-imagining, helping me find my way back to ‘others’ and a world I thought I knew.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Axon : Creative Explorations Contemporary Boundary Crossings and Ways of Speaking Poetically vol. 7 no. 2 December 2017 12853914 2017 periodical issue

    'This issue of Axon is the second to relate directly to Poetry on the Move, the series of festivals run by the International Poetry Studies Institute based within the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra. The theme of the festival in 2017 was Boundary Crossings, and it was offered – in a slightly expanded version, as a focus for poets and academics to interpret in their own fashion within this issue. Some but not all of the contributions here were presented within the festival; equally, not all festival contributions were shaped for journal publication; there are boundary crossings but divisions and distinctions remain.

    'As festival keynote talk, Glyn Maxwell's moving letter to his mentor, the late Derek Walcott, leads us into a remarkable variety of scenarios in which boundaries are addressed. The boundary of death might be considered an absolute, yet Maxwell manages to speak, poetically (albeit in prose), in such a way that we believe in the communication.' (Paul Munden :  Introduction)

         2017
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Last amended 7 Feb 2018 13:23:13
http://www.axonjournal.com.au/issue-13/politics-and-poetics-paying-attention-un-australia The Politics and Poetics of Paying Attention in Un-Australiasmall AustLit logo Axon : Creative Explorations
Subjects:
  • Christmas Island, Australian External Territories,
  • Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Australian External Territories,
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