AustLit

'The content in this issue of Axon: Creative Explorations offers a set of variations upon the theme of Absent Presences, the Secret and the Unsayable. The symposium of papers and poems gathered here derives from a day-long conversation at Reading University, UK, in June 2018. Practitioners and commentators from across the UK, and colleagues connected with the International Poetry Studies Institute, University of Canberra, convened to consider several preoccupations in Contemporary Lyric writing. We explored the parameters of our general theme through panels grouped variously under the titles ‘Present Absences and Absent Presences’; ‘Keeping a Secret by Saying You’ve Got One’; ‘Ambiguous, Ambivalent, and Open Utterance’; and ‘Showing the Unsayable’. These topic headings are worth repeating now, since their residual aftermaths are evident in the texture of the material in this issue. Much of the content published here has been reworked after our June 2018 conversations, and new material has been added by colleagues unable to speak at the initial symposium. The poems also included here offer a new slant, new impetus around the shared themes. This issue of Axon, therefore, contains multiple extensions from, and new reflections on, that original moment.' (Introduction)

'The quotation, ‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass’ is often cited as the first example of the adage, ‘Show, don’t tell’. Attributed to Chekhov, it encourages the writer to paint a picture for the reader, rather than explain everything to them. Compressed forms generally—like lyric poetry, prose poetry and even microfiction—are invested in ways of ‘showing’ because they have a limited space to ‘tell’ and therefore turn on their economy of words and expression. Poetic forms, in particular, are enigmatic because with compression comes ellipsis. Furthermore, the imagistic quality of poetry and its use of metaphors and similes provides an idea in the reader’s mind that not only limits words but also opens out beyond the bounds of the poem. Poems, in their appeal to showing rather than telling, embrace more than the sum of their individual parts.' (Introduction) 

'Many lyric poets register absence and loss in their work, to the extent that the sense of the ineffable conveyed by lyric poems may frequently result from an attempt to conjure an image of what is irrevocably gone. Bruce Fink contends, ‘Absence cannot even be understood as some thing until it is named’ (2004: 139) and, for lyric poets, that act of naming is usually the poem itself—which, in trying and failing to close the gap between reality and language, suggests the inherent poignancy of so much lyric utterance. Many poems that appear to be about presence are really reconstituting a sense of absence, formulating the lost in an unparaphrasable linguistic construction. The meanings of such poems are never fully available or explicable, caught as they are between a new image of what is gone and the unlocatable nature of what that image stands in for.'  (Introduction)

'Setting:

'‘Human, All Too Human is the monument of a crisis ... the title means “where you see ideal things, I see what is—human, alas, all-too-human”—I know man better’ (Nietzsche 1967a: 283; emphasis in original). So writes Nietzsche, opening his remarkable self-portrait Ecce Homo (‘Behold, the man’; written 1888, first published 1908), and reflecting bleakly on the mass of humanity. It is difficult to dispute this perspective given that, over the century-plus since Nietzsche wrote this, history has recorded crisis after crisis. Human is indeed all too human, never the ideal of which individuals and populations dream.' (Introduction)