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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 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 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)
1 ‘We Do Not Know Exactly What We Are Going to Say until We Have Said It’ : Interview Data on How Poems Are Made Paul Magee , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: New Writing , vol. 13 no. 3 2016; (p. 434-449) 'My paper reflects on an archive of in-depth interviews I and my colleagues have recorded with Anglophone poets, from a variety of countries, North and South. In particular, I reflect on responses to a question that split that field into two opposing camps. It concerned the function of spontaneity in poetic composition. The majority of poets interviewed said yes, often quite enthusiastically, to Auden’s proposition that when we ‘genuinely speak’ we are unaware of what we are about to say; many also seemed happy to affirm his implication that this is a key source of poetic value. Those who rejected these ideas were often passionate on the matter as well.' (Publication abstract)
1 Interview with Samuel Wagan Watson Paul Magee (interviewer), 2015 single work interview
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Journal , vol. 5 no. 1 2015; (p. 10-16)
1 Poetry and Risk : On the Similarities between Recital and Composition Paul Magee , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT : Journal of Writing and Writing Courses , October vol. 19 no. 2 2015; '‘Every time,’ Brazilian director, teacher, writer and erstwhile politician, Augusto Boal claims, ‘an actor plays a character, he or she plays it for the first and last time. Like we play every minute of our own lives’ (Boal 2002: 38). This article concerns the experiment of making by heart recitals of canonical twentieth century poems a compulsory assessment item in a creative writing unit. It details some surprising results of that experiment. One is that students demonstrated more capacity to develop a confident aesthetic about the rights and wrongs of their peers’ recitals than when engaging in similar group discussions about those same students’ verse compositions. The paper suggests that this disparity had to do with the students’ broad literacy in relation to acting, compared to their relative illiteracy in relation to what can be done in verse. It makes the further claim, with reference to Boal’s Games for Actors and Non-Actors (Boal 2002), Stephen Berkoff’s I am Hamlet (Berkoff 1989) and other texts, that this situation might not be as hopeless as it sounds. Could it be that by heart recitals brought these students closer to that form of creativity they actually already well know from film, stage and life, but need to get on the page: the one to do with inhabiting the tensions of the moment, and acting them out? For they also seemed to be writing much better poems.' (Publication abstract)
1 Rapid Eye Movement in the U.S.A. Paul Magee , 2015 single work prose
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , March vol. 5 no. 1 2015;
1 Observatory i "Wind sounds like water", Paul Magee , 2014 single work poetry
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 74 no. 1 2014; (p. 54)
1 3 y separately published work icon Stone Postcard Paul Magee , Elwood : John Leonard Press , 2014 7685749 2014 selected work poetry

The title poem in Stone Postcard is a passionate drama that thinks through the close kinship of solace and trauma, something neither 'private nor public, and always waiting. The book as a whole moves with that spacious idea. The focus is intense, as you might expect. The tone, at the same time, is often laconic.

'There are two Parts. The first, starting with a birth and fractured family, has an intimate scope; the second carries questions of belonging out to wider horizons. Paul Magee’s variety takes in a policeman embracing an exploding man in Iraq, the international committee that met to recalibrate the metre in 1983, a keyhole view, a toddler at the beach, visits to an office of Employment Plus, and to New Jersey. Virgil’s detailed, horrific account of war’s chaos in the siege of Latium unfolds a nine-page climax to the book.' (Publication summary)
1 Coney Island i "Coney Island dilapidates and is closed", Paul Magee , 2014 single work poetry
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Journal , vol. 4 no. 1 2014; (p. 121)
1 2. Inemployment i "four people now produce", Paul Magee , 2013 single work poetry
— Appears in: Meanjin , vol. 72 no. 1 2013; (p. 177)
1 1. Um...um...Ployment i "Tattooed from skull to shin, but blank-faced", Paul Magee , 2013 single work poetry
— Appears in: Meanjin , vol. 72 no. 1 2013; (p. 176)
1 ...Ployment/Inploymnt/Unumploymnt Paul Magee , 2013 sequence poetry
— Appears in: Meanjin , vol. 72 no. 1 2013; (p. 176-177)
1 Rupert in Japan i "Pribe Shotoku, who dedicated the temple at Horyuji,", Paul Magee , 2013 single work poetry
— Appears in: The Best Australian Poems 2013 2013; (p. 140)
1 Inquiry i "She had run, you see, snipping her thread and", Paul Magee , 2012 single work poetry
— Appears in: TEXT Special Issue Website Series , October no. 14 2012;
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