AustLit
Latest Issues
Contents
- A Voice for Handsi"The fine black hairs astonish me—", single work poetry
- Sculpting into Mindi"I love ephemeral things", single work poetry
- An Exercise in Trusti"On the floor", single work poetry
- White Rosesi"From the house where the hangings took place", single work poetry
- Angel Bread : Writing My Mother, single work essay
- Miranda's Songi"A white bird floats out like a handkerchief", single work poetry
- Shellsi"We walked on the beach, my brother ahead,", single work poetry
- The Sirensi"from safe suburbs they are calling", single work poetry
- Cemetery Lunchesi"He recalls freedom’s embrace by the canal", single work poetry
- Here, Where I Worki"If you come down my river-bridged road", single work poetry
- Looking from the Margins : Making and Reflecting on Poetry, single work criticism
- Thinking and Poetry, single work criticism
- Homesicknessi"Now nothing of the lived-in place", single work poetry
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Intimacy and Making : Thing Constellations of Consciousness and the Movements of Invention,
single work
criticism
'This paper takes up the three terms—creativity, consciousness and intimacy—and positions them as possible ‘ultimate terms’. Inquiring into the use of these terms to garner approval, status or power within cultural contexts, the paper attempts to unpack them, and simultaneously to seek out any structural similarities in the ways that they operate. The term ‘creativity’ is deconstructed via a Derridean framework, wherein ‘inventiveness’ is posited as a more rigorous alternative in most cases. Consciousness is read closely in relation to its association with notions of awareness and ‘enlightenment’. And ‘intimacy’ is playfully explored as an alternative term for enlightenment, a manoeuvre which brings to the fore some structural assumptions about that which intimacy might comprise. The assumption of intimacy as a spatially-dependent notion is also interrogated. The paper contends that intimacy may involve an unsettling of spatial assumptions proper, and therefore not be simply a function of closeness or distance. It draws on Serres’ notion of the angel as messenger and as analogy for the preposition, indicator of position, but occupant of none. Finally an example from art practice is offered, one that arguably performs the terms intimacy and creativity at once: an epistolary adventure in poetry and photographs, called The Post Project.' (Publication abstract)
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Intimacy and the Icarus Effect,
single work
criticism
'Intimacy is both a problem and a pleasure that has been a feature of narrative right across history. One very early example of intimacy and its discontents is the story of Daedalus and Icarus, remarkable not least for the way Icarus has become a trope, appearing in various guises in literary and visual art over the centuries since his early appearances in works by Ovid, Virgil, Apollodorus, Pausanias and Diodorus. The relationship between this artist father and his impressionable son is predicated on an intimacy that, like other intimacies, exploits the fragile relationship between self and other. Like so many such relationships, it ends badly, in a story that never reaches its end: Daedalus is always strapping the flawed wings onto his son, and kissing him for the last time; Icarus is always joyfully flying, and then falling.
'A contemporary version of this story-with-no-(good)-end is, we suggest, to be found in various narratives that have emerged since the start of the so-called war on terror. We propose to tease out the tensions between several ephemeral points: between individuals, between ideologies, and between patterns of signification. Foucault writes of 'the buried kinships between things' that poetry can rediscover; Lacan and Levinas in their different ways write of the ethical problems involved in attempting to reconcile self and other, attempting to suture the space between while retaining the fantasy of a discrete, though intimately known, self. Following these concepts, we will test the extent to which creative expression can invoke the intimacy between world and word, or self and other.' (Publication abstract)
- Plants, Processes, Places : Sensory Intimacy and Poetic Enquiry, single work criticism
- Variations on a Wound, sequence poetry
- I. Hand . . .) – Perhaps, Delirium?i"Whoever opens the hand will find the way in.", single work poetry
- II. Either Love Is - A Shrine? or Else a Scar.i"Much shedding still to be done. Winter in Venice,", single work poetry
- III. and at Last a Hand Receives the Nail in It. A Logic That Turns Everything Over. To Separate.i"We must not start with the nail. First there was poetry", single work poetry
