AustLit

'This essay offers an exegetical reflection on research that underpinned poems drafted over a six-month period. For a recent writing residency at the Australia Council BR Whiting Studio in Rome, I devised a prose poetry project critiquing the often negative representational politics of recent global population movements into southern Italy. I researched the Italian political context and undertook field trips in order to evoke the influx of refugees and asylum seekers into Italy’s urban centres. The challenge was to portray individual human stories in poetical yet ethically activated ways in relation to depictions of others. This essay therefore explores what ‘counter-framing’ (Maley 2016: 193) of journeys and experiences of refugees and asylum seekers might be possible through the contemporary ‘voice’ of the prose poem. How might the prose poem, over and above, or in tandem with, other poetic modes, enact poetic and political counterframing of people movements?' (Publication abstract)