AustLit

'Despite many attempts over many decades, it is difficult to point to a single straightforward definition of poetry; but perhaps the most often cited phrase is that it is the use of language and prosody to stir the imagination and the emotions; to concentrate one’s awareness of experience. Both framings -- imagination/emotion, and concentrated awareness -- feature in the essays including in this issue. And, given that this issue is both the product of a poetry conference, and focuses entirely on poetry, a number of the contributions are combinations of poetic sequences (in text, images and film) and short contextualising essays. Attention is given to poetry directed at social or political change; poetry emerging on new platforms, in new relationships or for new audiences; and the exploration of various modes of writing.' (Publication abstract)

'Text|Page|Art explores various ways to engage page space with images, sound and text. There is a particular focus on the book as art. You, the reader, also have the chance to download and print a variety of zines, and to create your own. Edited by Caren Florance.' (Publication summary)

'A great deal of poetry and other creative writing uses diverse archival material, including the literary, historical and the biographical. Yet the relationship of creative writers—and creative artists more generally—to existing archives has often been uncomfortable and has posed significant questions for the writers, historians and archivists involved. This issue brings numerous research and creative perspectives to bear on these relationships, including the perspectives of writers who have found the archives richly populated with material relevant to their projects, and writers who have found very little archival material at all connecting to their creative work. In every case, these writers have addressed archival material in particular ways, shaping it for their own creative and often political purposes.' (Paul Hetherington Editorial)

'There has been a growing creative interest and scholarly engagement with practices and frameworks of care and repair and their real and implied relationship to breakage and acts of restoration. While not specifically directed at the year that was 2020, there are many ways in which the worlds in which we now live might be in need of mending. And how might we envisage recovery? This issue takes a broad interpretation of the theme and submissions explore, challenge and respond in a multitude of ways.' (Publication summary)

'This issue of the Axon journal investigates ways in which contemporary poetry speculates about the world, modes of being, reality, creativity, writing itself and ways of understanding the quotidian.

'The period in which these various articles and poems were written (or at least submitted) was one in which the quotidian itself had been anything but predictable. Things that we had long assumed to be part of everyday life were out of reach, new and strange familiarities taking their place. Perhaps, in this respect, our general experience of the world could be said to have verged, through this phase, towards the unusual perspectives that poetry has given us so compellingly through the ages. Many more of us, I suspect, have been pushed towards greater introspection — and reflection. It is fascinating how those two things go together, as Paul Venzo articulates so well here, firstly in relation to sonnets by Petrarch and Shakespeare, but by extension to many contemporary sonnets, which ‘continue to encourage us to speculate on our position in the world: not just our relationship to others, but also to ourselves’.' (Introduction)

'The theme for this issue of Axon emerged during a conference in late 2019, where paper after paper combined coherent research with impassioned critiques of the state of the university, the state of the environment, and the state of politics. Evident in these presentations was both a determination to generate positive change, and impatience at the apparent slowness of senior members’ responses to the what-is of the current moment. It seemed timely to provide a platform for these concerns, and invite contributions that combine personal, political and scholarly passions; and the manifesto form seemed to have the right combination of elements for this context.' (Introduction)

'In preparation, this issue of Axon went under the title of Poetry on the Move, the name of the poetry festival initiated by the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) in 2015. Since that first year, however, the festivals have had distinguishing themes. In 2019, the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the theme — and title of the festival symposium — was ‘Small Leaps, Giant Steps’, and this issue brings together a number of papers presented at the symposium, as well as contributions from poets who were not able to attend the event.' (Paul Munden : Publication introduction)

'Canberra is home to a surprising number of creative and research-oriented events, and two of them are reflected in this issue of Axon. The first is the product of the 2018 annual DESIGN Canberra festival, which centred on the generative contributions of the architect Enrico Taglietti and the built environment he helped create in this city. The second event addressed the natural environment, with particular reference to the marriage of science and poetry, and what affordances this provides for the building of knowledge and understanding. The product of the editors of the poetry journal Not Very Quiet working in collaboration with the Axon editors, it brought together sixteen women poets and nine women scientists / scholars to present a public reading in mid-2019.' (Editorial introduction)

'When discussing metaphors of inhabitation and dwelling and their relationship to language, Heidegger’s enigmatic claim in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1946), comes to mind: 

'Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. (239)

'This statement highlights an important connection between language and being, but also asks questions about the accommodation of utterance and its properties. For Heidegger, the way we occupy language assists us in belonging. Furthermore, in his reflections on thinking, Heidegger argues that poetic language is crucial to ways of being in its ability to illuminate thinking and offer wisdom:

'I shall mention poetry now only in passing. It is confronted by the same question, and in the same manner, as thinking. But Aristotle's words in the Poetics, although they have scarcely been pondered, are still valid – that poetizing is truer than the exploration of beings. (275)' (Editorial introduction)

'The contributions in this issue have been gathered together from various sources including a number of events addressing the themes of this issue. Primarily, these were the Turning Point: Creative Arts and Trauma symposium (University of Canberra, 7 June 2017), and the Narratives of Health and Wellbeing Research Conference (CQUniversity, Noosa campus, 26–27 October 2017). In addition, a series of interviews generated from the ARC-funded project, Understanding Creative Excellence: A Case Study in Poetry (DP130100402) sparked the idea of recruiting more conversations between creative practitioners working in a range of art practices: poetry, prose fiction, film and visual art in particular. Together, these contributions comprise a fascinating, revealing and sometimes provocative collection.' (Editorial introduction)

'Material poetics is not a new concept. The last century has seen the boundaries between creative genres dissolve, allowing attentiveness to materiality — once the exclusive concern of sculpture and craft — to pervade and tantalise less tangible practices. The development of a digital realm has not destroyed materiality, as originally feared, but served to foreground it; and the collaboration that can take place between digital and analogue, verbal and visual, is what drives this issue.

'Writers such as Kristen Kreider (Poetics and Place: The Architecture of Sign, Subject and Site, 2014), Lyn Hejinian (The Language of Inquiry), James Stuart (The Material Poem), Astrid Lorange (On Language as Material), and others deal with language, its material properties, its affinitive qualities. Where creative practitioners in general work with physical, tangible materials – everything from paper and paint through to the body – writers typically have nothing but language as their material. However, words, phrases, sentences and lines have their own tactility and affordances, and this is explored in the special section in this issue – ‘The Poetic Line’, edited by Owen Bullock. His introduction provides a context to the line, its property and its potential; and the contributions to that section, as well as contributions by poets Geoff Page and Jackson to the main section, exemplify the material practices of poets.'  (Editorial introduction)

'When we first announced the international symposium, Inside/Outside/Carnival, that took place at the University of Winchester, UK, in June 2017 (a collaboration between the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) at the University of Canberra, and the University of Winchester, with invited guest speakers from the USA, Australia and the UK) we prefaced it with, ‘Into the cauldron of 21st century writing - Tipping a hat at Bakhtin the word Carnival is ambiguous. It tilts at blurred edges, a world upside down and inside out.’ We had no idea what would come about and a cauldron seemed a relevant metaphor at the time. And so it proved because we now have this collection of articles, essays, prose, prose poetry and poetry, which shows how a simple idea can have such a remarkable melting pot response.' (Introduction)

'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)

'Play evades and escapes our attempts to define and delimit. It has variously been positioned as benign, crucial, intractable, frivolous, developmental, wasteful and subversive. While it may occur ‘between the cracks of ordinary life’ (Henricks 2006: 1) and be denoted by a ‘feeling of Otherwise’ (Shields 2015: 300), it is the very everydayness of playful engagement that captures our attention in this issue of Axon. As the papers and works brought together here attest, it is hard to imagine creativity without play. Play infiltrates and enlivens creative practice research. It allows us to think and to be otherwise in the academy.' (From introduction)

'The academic critique of the conditions of creative work has always been slightly disingenuous. In the name of a ‘workerist’ critique – one which highlights the poor returns to artists according to normative models of labour market analysis – the study of creative labour has de-emphasised the fact that the modern notion of ‘work’ is itself placed in question by artists. But the artistic critique of work, as Luc Boltanski an Eve Chiapello usefully describe it, has been central to the vocation of the artist since at least Industrial Modernity. Despite the rise of a commercial cultural economy in the twentieth century, it is hard to imagine an arts sector without the prolific moral economies which, although enabling of appropriation and exploitation due to the weak formalisation of exchange, sustain alternative models of value that contest the commodification of creative activity. Indeed, it is this critique that has in recent decades placed the artist at the avant-garde of discussions of changes to work in general.' (Introduction)