AustLit

'An engaging and authoritative introduction to an increasingly important and popular literary genre

'Prose Poetry is the first book of its kind-an engaging and authoritative introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. Poets and scholars Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton introduce prose poetry's key characteristics, chart its evolution from the nineteenth century to the present, and discuss many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today's most inventive writing.

'A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. Prose Poetry explains how this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing prose poetry' s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and female prose poets, documenting women's essential but frequently unacknowledged contributions to the genre.

'Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.' (Publication summary)

'The majority of Japanese poetry currently reaches a limited readership outside of Japan. As a result, many contemporary Japanese poets are searching for ways to have their poems translated into English and published in English-language journals. Achieving satisfactory translation results, however, is considerably more complicated than switching words from one language into another and scholarship on the subject of translating Japanese poetry is often vexed. This scholarship frequently traverses much of the same ground as the debate about Japanese prose translation where, depending on their approach, translators may be labelled ‘literalists’ or ‘libertines’. This paper argues that co-translating Japanese poetry may be as much about sharing ideas and ideologies as about lineation, cadence or word choice. Co-translating Japanese poetry has the power to build cross-cultural understandings and to explore and promote ways of understanding Japanese identity. We argue that while translation is often undertaken by the translators in their country of residence, the experience of genius loci and undertaking co-translation in situ may best accommodate such a cross-cultural synergy.

'This paper draws on our collective experiences in a series of translation workshops at Meiji University. These were organised by Rina Kikuchi, a literary scholar and translator from Japan. Among other Australian poets and scholars, Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton were paired with Japanese poets for co-translation purposes. They co-translated Japanese poetry into English and had their own poems translated into Japanese with the assistance of Kikuchi who acted as the lynchpin for the workshops. The experience was celebrated in a series of poetry readings in Tokyo and Nara. Significantly, although neither Hetherington nor Atherton is fluent in Japanese, they found the process of co-translation to include what one may call an attentive cosmopolitanism, incorporating respect and understanding for different cultural assumptions and poetic ideas.' (Publication abstract) 

'This bilingual Homings and Departures anthology presents the absorbing and compelling poetry of 41 outstanding Australian poets in both English and Mandarin. The anthology is the result of a collaboration between poets, scholars and translators from the China Australia Writing Centre at Curtin University, Western Australia; the International Poetry Studies group at the University of Canberra; and Fudan University in Shanghai. Edited by Lucy Dougan and Paul Hetherington, it reflects the importance of international literary and cultural connections as a way of extending our conceptions of ‘home’ and ‘elsewhere’.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'John Kinsella’s three-volume Graphology Poems: 1995–2015 (2016) constitutes a major and shifting set of poetic statements. Partly a discontinuous poetic chronicle of life in Western Australia’s Avon Valley, they are also an investigation of ways in which an activist poetry may inscribe aspects of being, self and experience while protesting against environmental challenges and degradation. As these poems sprawl in many directions and express overlapping preoccupations, and as they emphasise the unsettled and unstable while affirming what has a continuing importance, so they constitute a series of ethical positions connected to living sustainably and responsibly. They also explore the porous nature of a poetic activism that steps out into the quotidian world while simultaneously refashioning the poetic, challenging and even subverting the language of the contemporary lyric and the contemporary pastoral. The Graphology poems prize incompleteness and the fragmentary, open out to reveal absences and imply other texts, value multiple meanings and represent many of the most important strands of Kinsella’s work.' (Publication abstract)

'When Charity finds letters, journals and sketches in the roof of her great-aunt’s house, she uncovers a rich family history that she must piece together from fragments. Great-aunt Birdie’s letters to her lover are a compelling and revealing account of life for many women in the 1930s. Her experiences as an artist in the first decades of the century, and her earlier relationship with a young man who goes to war, also provide powerful insights into a woman who, as Charity begins to suspect, wanted more than her era would allow.'

Source: Publishr's blurb.

'Until recently, Australian prose poetry hasn’t attracted much attention – we’re not sure why. Having written prose poetry for years, we’re both fascinated by the form, which can be loosely defined as poems written in paragraphs and sentences rather than in stanzas and lines.' (Introduction)

'Homings & Departures is a poetry translation project of the China Australia Writing Centre (CAWC) at Curtin and Fudan Universities, and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) at the University of Canberra. As worldwide borders close and movements are restricted, the project’s title has gained a pressing new relevance. If bodies cannot travel then words, at least, can. In a spirit of nuanced exchange, CAWC at Curtin and Fudan, along with IPSI, continue their creative collaboration at a time when it is increasingly vital.' (Introduction)

'Making poetry and the act of reading are intimately connected. Such reading, along with poetry research and scholarship, has the capacity to open new avenues for creative thought and fresh pathways to creative work, particularly through intertextual strategies. In this way, literary scholarship may provide a lens for seeing more deeply into one’s own creative writing practice; and reading and writing may be viewed as having intimate linking tendrils. The nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson produced a large body of work characterised by numerous intertextual strategies and references, much of which speaks to the present day. Further, her poetic preoccupations focus on issues connected to the self and personal identity – and an associated critique of conventional mores – providing an exemplar for contemporary poets with related interests and preoccupations. For instance, Cassandra Atherton’s book, Exhumed, uses the metaphor of interring and disinterring to discuss a range of intertexts buried or unearthed in her prose poetry, and these works humorously interpret and self-reflexively explore the experience of women writing; and Paul Hetherington’s prose poetry sequence, Palace of Memory, makes use of significant intertexts – including from Dickinson – to assist him in ‘reading’ his own experience and making new work.' (Publication abstract)